Word: thurberism
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...slaphappy, overlong mixture of You Can't Take It With You, Rackety Rax and assorted gags, Rise And Shine in no way resembles the original on which it was based: Humorist James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times. But it has enough good farce to make it go - especially Walter Brennan's portrayal of a glandular octogenarian with a propensity for showing his Civil War etchings to willing blondes...
...diversified. (The adverb must be added hastily when one remembers the apparently wide range of interests of the average New York Times book-reporter.) "Reading I've Liker" is an unpretentious collection which represents various aspects of that taste. The book does include, for example, the whole of James Thurber's "My Life and Hard Times" (which any Thurber-connoisseur will tell you is the master's chef-d'ocuvre), stories by Maugham, Beerbohm, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, excerpts from Eve Curie and Fowler's "Modern English Usage," and Judge Woolsey's decision lifting the ban on "Ulysses...
...James Thurber and Elliot Nugent, in addition to a gift for epigrammatic turns of phrase and scintillating repartee, have that ability which Sinclair Lewis has shown in his better novels--the ability to take people, exploit their every characteristic facet until they are a group of caricatures, but create caricatures which are exaggerated only enough to make them more vivid and real and not so much as to make them meretricious and ridiculous...
Navy's press section, smaller, but more experienced from pre-Defense days in handling publicity, is somewhat thinnerskinned. It has a nucleus of capable men -Captain Alan G. Kirk, longtime Naval Attache in London, Chief of the Intelligence Division; Commander Harry R. Thurber, head of Navy's press section; Lieut. Commander Robert Berry...
Collier's tales are much like those of Lord Dunsany (Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens). But his taste is less for the dewy groves of dancing pixies than for the chasms and black alleyways where fiends hang out. Nor is this the madness of James Thurber (The Owl in the Attic, Fables for Our Time), smelling of neurosis, manic depression and similar 20th-Century ills. Collier offers a fuller-blooded evil often conjured up with appropriate 17th-Century English suggesting the grimmer scenes of King Lear. From that play he plucked titles for two former books: Defy...