Word: thurbers
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...printed pieces, Thurber was a master of turning a homely personal detail--his troubles with his housekeepers, say, or the night his bed collapsed--into an affecting, hilarious story. Thurber's character Walter Mitty, reduced to a life of fantasy in an otherwise banal existence, remains the quintessential twentieth-century nebbish...
...details that Thurber glorified in his writings are just plain boring in his correspondence. Ironically, the letters themselves reveal the crucial element they lack--a good editing. "I sold The New Yorker [a piece] on which I spent a week of days and nights," he writes his friend E.B. White. To Herman Miller, another intimate, he writes. "I am enclosing [my pastiche] on Henry James. I spend four months on it two winters ago, but found on going back to it that it need trimming and changes...During the four months I worked on it day and night...
CERTAIN OF THURBER'S LETTERS serve one useful--if unintentional--function: They provide a glimpse at an aspect of Thurber's personality that never emerges in his published writings. Here the self-effacement and congeniality that inform Thurber's prose are stripped back to reveal their dark side: an undercurrent of self-absorption and crankiness...
...instance, in a letter to an editor at Horizon magazine, apparently responding to a request to sit for a photograph, Thurber writes...
...book's only example of a response from Thurber to fan-mail is no kinder...