Word: thurber
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Whether Thurber's drawing requires psychiatry or not, a great many people, including New Yorker Editor Harold Ross, cannot get enough of it. A series of murals, executed by Thurber years ago in Manhattan for Tim Costello's Third Avenue saloon (known to its clientele as "The Chop House of Broken Dreams"), is one of the extracurricular features of the establishment. The late Paul Nash, British painter and art critic, once declared Thurber "a master of impressionistic line," comparing him to the early Matisse...
That enraged most of the professional artists Thurber knew, and sent him into delighted guffaws; not only has he never had a lesson, but he has never taken his drawing seriously. He loves to tell of the time Ross was asked why he ran such a fifth-rate artist as Thurber in his magazine. "Thurber's a third-rate artist," Ross snapped loyally...
...Thurber's work, which comprises 17 volumes of prose and pictures, Nobel Prizeman T. S. Eliot said last year: "It is a form of humor which is also a way of saying something serious. There is a criticism of life at the bottom of it. It is serious and even somber. Unlike so much humor, it is not merely a criticism of manners-that is, of the superficial aspects of society at a given moment-but something more profound. His writings and also his illustrations are capable of surviving the immediate environment and time out of which they spring...
...Women and Dogs ought to be quite a document in its own right. After Thurber's opening lecture, the rest will consist of: 1) animated versions of the stories, You Could Look It Up (how a big-league ball club won a pennant by-sending a midget in to bat) and The Unicorn in the Garden (how a woman tried to have her husband sent to the booby hatch and was instead committed herself); 2) dramatizations, using flesh & blood actors, of four of the "Mr. & Mrs. Monroe" stories, dealing with marriage perplexities; 3) another animated lecture, urging the superiority...
Slow Fade. Thurber is not totally blind. At the age of six, he lost his left eye when one of his brothers accidentally shot him with an arrow. For about the next 40 years, his right eye did double duty, then it failed him; ten years ago, Thurber underwent five extremely painful operations on it for cataract and trachoma. The eye has since had one-eighth vision, not enough for a 56-year-old writer to get himself around with safety. The shins of the long, gangling (6 ft. 1½ in., 154 Ibs.) Thurber bear a mass of scars...