Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)"The Thurber Carnival" was a beloved companion of my early youth; I laughed out loud again and again at the stories of "My Life and Hard Times," the hilarious "Fables for Our Time," "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," and other classics. What was really important to me about Thurber was that he came from the same part of Ohio that I did, and actually had had relatives and attended family reunions in Sugar Grove, Ohio, where I grew up. That meant all the world to me, because it showed me that someone who had ties to Sugar Grove could be a famous writer. Now, I love Thurber's work more than ever; as an adult, I can better appreciate the nuances of a story like "The Catbird Seat." Thurber's work is a precise, funny, yet deeply serious portrait of an America which had just recently completed the transition from a frontier to an urban society. Women, having just won the right to vote, were flexing new-found muscles; men, divorced from the need to wrest a living from the soil, felt suddenly unmoored and emasculated; a new breed of self-help authors arose to make a quick buck from the newly uncertain populace; and oceans of alcohol fueled the newly stirred resentments between the sexes.Thurber recorded it all, in a prose style as elegant and lucid as any in the history of American literature. "The Catbird Seat," "Fables for Our Time" and the self-help parodies of "Let Your Mind Alone!" are every bit as fresh and pertinent as when Thurber wrote them 60-odd years ago. Unfortunately, some aspects of his work--most glaringly his portrayal of African-Americans--have not stood up so well. But one can only say of Thurber what the Duc de Saint-Simon said of Louis XIV: "His virtues were his own, his faults were his times'." The best of James Thurber ranks with the best of Mark Twain, Ring Lardner, Woody Allen and any other American humorist you can name.
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