Word: thurberism
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...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...
...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...
...Battle of the Sexes (Bryanston; Continental), the less amusing of the two comedies, nevertheless permits Sellers to perform a minor prodigy of uproarious understatement. The picture transposes The Catbird Seat, a wickedly funny short story by James Thurber, from Manhattan to Edinburgh, and expands it from about eight pages of print to 88 minutes of celluloid. Sellers plays the hero of the piece, a timid soul with a face as blank as a manila folder, who has lived without women, whisky, cigarettes, or even regrets, and has worked for 35 somnolent years as a bookkeeper in the dingy Victorian offices...
...Thurber Carnival. The men, women and dogs that chase one another through Humorist James Thurber's mind come yakking and yipping to the stage in a grand, slightly bland evening...