Word: thurberism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Battle of the Sexes. Thurber's The Catbird Seat, wondrously transmogrified by a queer breed of cat: Actor Peter Sellers, as a timorous Edinburgh clerk, is determined to murder an American efficiency expert (Constance Cummings) who threatens his inky way of life...
...slight, polite, shy man of 52, Shawn was groomed for years to take over. An old New Yorker hand recalls Shawn's arrival on the staff in 1933: "To him, it was like entering the priesthood." Says James Thurber, the peerless humorist, now 65, who chronicled the earlier era in The Years with Ross: "There was no question that Ross wanted Shawn to succeed him, and the whole staff was pulling for him, too." It still is. Shawn is a gentle boss, and so sensitive to writers' feelings that he once called Drama Critic Kenneth Tynan in Havana...
...Shawn who persuaded a skeptical Ross to introduce the magazine's excellent World War II coverage, and to devote an entire issue to John Hersey's report on Hiroshima. Shawn is now handicapped by the fact that most of the writers (Thurber, E. B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, Clifton Fadiman, Joel Sayre, Alva Johnston, et al.) and cartoonists (Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, O. Soglow, Gardner Rea, et al.) who made The New Yorker famous have either died, wandered off to the exurbs, or become infrequent contributors. E. B. White's civilized despair and gentle celebration of nature...
...Humorist Thurber tends to blame The New Yorker's drawbacks on the changing tastes of the times: "The New Yorker has represented every damn decade in which it's been published. In the '20s, humorists were a dime a dozen; everyone was drinking champagne and cutting up neckties. In 1960, everyone's talking too much, reminiscing about his childhood. You can't get humor into the magazine if people aren't writing...
...Battle of the Sexes. Outguinnessing Guinness, in a transatlantic adaptation of James Thurber's The Catbird Seat, Britain's Peter Sellers is an Edinburgh bookkeeper ready to murder the 20th century's threat to his traditional way of life...