Word: thurberism
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...confident that its crossroads listeners-in Anchorage, Alaska, Alamosa, Colo., Hickory, N.C., Siloam Springs, Ark.-will eat up Author Critics, whose past guest-victims have ranged from James Thurber to Lucius Beebe, Emily Hahn to Ilka Chase. KBS is doubly confident because the Book-of-the-Month is offering book prizes for the best letters from listeners. Said a small-town-wise KBS official: "Whenever you give them a prize, they're happy...
...James Thurber, whose satirist's stock in trade is cartoons and essays on inhibited males and uninhibited females, received proposals of marriage from two Smith College seniors. They wrote "the funniest man in the world" that if he was not available they would like to marry his sons. Grey-haired, badger-faced Humorist Thurber, 50, wrote back: "I always reply ... to girls who want to marry me or my sons. Unhappily . . . I am married and am much too old for you anyway. My only child is a daughter of 14. She lives in, of all places, Amherst. No doubt...
...goings on in Thurber's deceptively casual cartoons range, from the neurasthenic to the pathological. But, like a psychic distorting mirror, they reflect reality-well-locked in the subconscious though it may be. Little boys bite little girls; men hear seals barking in the middle of the night; shapeless women spring into rooms crying, "I come from haunts of coot and hern." Doctors abandon restraint ("You're not my patient, you're my meat, Mrs. Quist...
...Author supplies readers of his Carnival with an illuminating biographical sketch, My Fifty Years with James Thurber (he is 49, "but the publishers felt that 'fifty' would sound more effective"). "Not a great deal," says the autobiographer, "is known about his earliest years, beyond the fact that he could walk when he was four." After several years of newspaper work, he turned up on the New Yorker in the late '203-starting out, according to New Yorker custom, as managing editor. He edited so unmanageably and wrote so well that he was soon made writer...
...Writes Thurber: "Thurber goes on as he always has, walking now a little more slowly, answering fewer letters, jumping at slighter sounds. . . . He [moves] restlessly from one Connecticut town to another, hunting for the Great Good Place. There he plans to spend his days reading Huckleberry Finn...