Word: thurber
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Princess Margaret tracks the regal personage from its earliest years when it could be found in the nursery, biting its older sister. At times, Margaret seems to have walked from a Thurber cartoon, inquiring in 1939, "Who is this Hitler, spoiling everything?" By her early 20s she has become a peculiar amalgam of Elizabeth Taylor and an acrylic doll, possessing "an almost Semitic beauty with a Lucite complexion...
...inhale it by the cubic yard. But it comes flirtatiously close to novelizing, a practice Keillor claims in a funny preface to have forsworn after one grotesquely bad unpublishable failure. He writes short pieces, he says, in homage to The New Yorker's former great infield of James Thurber, A.J. Liebling, S.J. Perelman and E.B. White...
TUCHMAN'S TALENT FOR bringing historic episodes into sharp, dramatic focus has few rivals among modern writers. The words James Thurber once wrote of E.B. White could apply to Tuchman too: her sentences are "silver and crystal"; her ear "not only notes the louder cosmic rhythms, but catches the faintest ticking sounds...
...though, the best criticism of The Selected Letters James Thurber is Thurber's own. It comes in "The Letters of James Thurber." by far the best piece of writing in the book, and it shows that when he gave something the "week of days and nights" treatment. Thurber was always a step ahead of the sheriff...
...letters are published after his death that they have any effect and this effect is usually only on literary critics. Nobody else ever reads a volume of letters and anybody who says he does is a liar.... I am not sure that we should not judge [Thurber] too harshly. Michael W. Miller