Word: verbale
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...comic writer; in between, he is a psychologist as keen as any now writing in the U.S. Like most writers of unusual, not to say violent imagination, Thurber cannot always control it. There are passages in all his fairy tales (especially in The White Deer) so loaded with verbal gems-and costume jewelry too-that they clink...
...Thirteen Clocks, Thurber's narrative is less bedizened with verbal gimcrackery, but it is still a bit too tricky for every taste. Nevertheless, there is no living author who moves about in fairyland with such wit and easy familiarity. As for inner meanings, please yourself...
...book, with all the sparkle of Thurber at his best. Amid the humor and the horse play there are lines of great beauty ("The Princess Saralinds. . . were serenity brightly like the rainbow." "Somewhere a clock dropped a stony chime into the night") One can enjoy this story for its verbal felicity alone...
...singing robes as casually over his street clothes as a judge does his bench gown. There is a saving exuberance and sense of fun about the worst of The Lady, as there is a soaring ease about the best of it. After the naturalistic theater's monotonous verbal drip-drip into a bucket, The Lady's Not for Burning makes a fine bright careless splash...
...page of it is a model of the art of conducting unfair arguments. He was a highly original artist and the art lay in the transmuting of disruptive debate into a kind of classical Mozartian music. The plays date most seriously when they are debates, yet the verbal wit is perennially irresistible. There is no writer who so conspicuously and largely holds the whole social and political and intellectual life of a long, rich period of heresy and revolt in his hands, a revolt against everything from marriage to God-and back...