Word: thurber
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...person may pick up a volume of correspondence now and then and read a letter here and there, but he never gets any connected idea of what the man is trying to say and abandons the book for the poems of John Greenleaf Whittier." --James Thurber (from "The Letters of James Thurber." The New Yorker...
...JAMES THURBER'S own letters have been published now, and his mock introduction to an imaginary volume of his own correspondence--which the collection's editors have reprinted as a preface--is as fitting an epitaph as any. Thurber knew better than anyone--better, certainly, than his wife and his editor at The Atlantic, the reverent preservers of his letters--that writing for publication and writing mail are two different things. One of them does not produce crisp polished prose...
What is does produce, in Thurber's case, is the most tedious sort of ramblings about his travels, his finances, and--in elaborate, unsparing detail--his failing eyesight. The editors identify "the Thurber Circle" as Wolcott Gibbs, Frank Sullivan Kenneth Tynan, and a few other literary buddies, but the letters make it clear that the circle that preoccupied Thurber was his right retina. An entire section of the book is devoted to Thurber's correspondence with his opthalmologist, in which he generally has this kind of thing...
...that the citizenry begrudges its head of state a bit of a rest. James Thurber said that "it is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all," but Reagan seems to have lost nothing in public esteem by taking time off. In fact such be havior is tacitly expected of him. Not only is a long vacation consistent with his political philosophy of governing best by governing least; it is also part of the modus operandi he established as California's Governor: in by 9, out by 5. If Reagan has mastered...
...Lurie, John Gardner, Elizabeth Janeway and Ursula Le Guin have produced exemplary children's books. Of course, scholars and artists are not new to the libraries of kid lit. A generation ago, Essayist E.B. White composed his classics Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web, and Humorist James Thurber wrote The Thirteen Clocks, just as, a decade before, Oxford Don J.R.R. Tolkien had written The Hobbit, and before him, another Oxonian, Lewis Carroll, had produced the Alice books. But seldom have parents and children been offered such a multitude of first-rate works (see box) along with the customary...