Word: thurbers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Mary Agnes Fisher Thurber, 89, mother of The New Yorker Humorist James Thurber and subject of his essay Lavender with a Difference: "Lavender and old lace ... are not for Mary Thurber. It would be hard for me to say what it is ... She never wears black . . . 'Black is for old ladies,' she told me . . . not long ago"; in Columbus, Ohio...
...THURBER'S DOGS, by James Thurber (294 pp.; Simon & Schuster: $3.95), are certainly the most lovingly regarded dogs in U.S. literature. Whether he draws them or writes about them, Thurber does it with the air of a man who knows what it is to lead a dog's life. A collection of pieces and pictures sometimes as affecting as they are funny...
...able for a placidity of viewpoint unlike much social satire. The other stories are marred more or less, as I have said, by an obvious effort to be murky or ultra-lucid. The "Art of Fiction" interview, tenth of a uniformly excellent series, is with James Thurber...
...yarns of plugging canal leaks, spiriting runaway slaves along the underground railway, and keeping books for a traveling circus are crammed with theologasters, dawpluckers, makebates, hoodledashers and such archaic huncamunca. His grandson's version of baseball in the Abner Doubleday country may not be so uproarious as James Thurber's rowdy recollections of the game in Columbus, Ohio. But his saga of Hop Bitters ("The Invalid's Friend& Hope"-alcoholic content: 40%), which Patent Medicine Man Asa T. Soule of Rochester put over by promoting a baseball team and a hilariously crooked sculling championship, invites comparison with...
...Greek Myths (Penguin; 95? a vol.), takes the Egg with a pinch of salt insofar as it pretends to historical accuracy. But he considers it a sound Egg in the mythical sense, in that it expresses the true and natural order of things. For like the Pelasgians and James Thurber, Poet Graves has no doubt that "woman [is] the dominant sex and man her frightened victim." If the world is in a mess today he says, it is because egoistical man dethroned the Eggoistical goddess and replaced her with grim-faced deities named Zeus, Jupiter, Jehovah...