Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A new comedy by The Male Animal: A new comedy by James Thurber. by birthday from the calendar. TimeSearch for Books and Writers by Bamber Gascoigne. This is an archive of a dead website. The original website was published by Petri Liukkonen under Creative Commons BY-ND-NC 1.0 Finland and reproduced here under those terms for non-commercial use. All pages are unmodified as they originally appeared; some links and images may no longer function. A .zip of the website is also available. American writer and cartoonist, who dealt with the frustrations of modern world. Thurber's best-known characters are Walter Mitty, his snarling wife, and silently observing animals. His stories have influenced later writers, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. Thurber is generally acknowledged as the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain (1835-1910). James Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio. His father, Charles L. Thurber, was a clerk and minor politician, who went through many periods of unemployment. Mary Thurber, his mother, was a strong-minded woman and a practical joker. Once she surprised her guests by explaining that she was kept in the attic because of her love for the postman. On another occasion she pretended to be a cripple and attended a faith healer's revival, jumping up suddenly and proclaiming herself cured. Thurber described her as "a born comedienne" and "one of the finest comic talents I think I've ever known." Thurber's father, who had dreams of being an actor or lawyer, was said to have been the basis of the typical small, slight man of Thurber's stories. Later Thurber portrayed his family in My Life and Hard Times (1933). "I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father," Thurber wrote in the book. Thurber was partially blinded by a childhood accident – his brother William shot an arrow at him. When he was unable to participate in games and sports with other children, he developed a rich fantasy life, which found its outlet in his writings. Thurber began writing at secondary school. Due to his poor eyesight, he did not serve in WW I, but studied between 1913 and 1918 at Ohio State University. He worked as a code clerk in Washington, DC, and at the US embassy in Paris. In the early 1920s he worked as a journalist for several newspapers. He also lived in Paris, writing for the Chicago Tribune . In 1926 Thurber went to New York City. For a period he worked as a reporter for the Evening Post , and then joined Harold Ross's newly established The New Yorker , where he found his clear, concise prose style. "Everybody thinks he knows English," Ross said to Thurber, "but nobody does. I think it's because of the goddam women and schoolteachers." Later Thurber published his memoirs from this period under the title The Years with Ross (1959). Originally Ross hired Thurber to be his "Jesus," (a corruption of "genius"), who would make the magazine to work, but during the years he hired one Jesus after another, who never quite managed to deliver what they were supposed to. Thurber was married twice, and had one daughter. He married in 1922 Althea Adams, the daughter of an army doctor; her mother was a faculty member of the Home Economics Department at Ohio State. She was a striking woman, a dominating personality with strong intellectual and artistic interests. The marriage was unhappy and ended in divorce in 1935. Althea filed divorce papers in Connecticut, on the grounds of "intolerable cruelty." She received the house in Sandy Hook, custody of their daughter Rosemary, life insurance policies, alimony until she remarried and the first year's profits from My Life and Hard Times . After divorce Thurber met Hele Wismer, a magazine editor, in the Algonquin Hotel lobby in New York; they were married one month later. She got his finances in order, dressed him well, and became a friend to Rosemary, and Althea, too. "Of the twenty-six years they were together," wrote Harrison Kinney, "Thurber was legally blind through twenty-one of them, and that he kept going as long and as well as he did may be credited in large part to Helen's care and her commitment to the partnership." Thurber's first book, Is Sex Necessary? , came out in 1929. It was jointly written with the fellow New Yorker staffer E.B. White. The book presented Thurber's drawings on the subject, and instantly established him as a true comic talent. Thurber made fun of European psychoanalysis, including Freud's work, and theorists who had been attempting to reduce sex to a scientifically understandable level. In 'The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism' Thurber claimed that "in no other civilized nation are the biological aspects of love so distorted and transcended by emphasis upon its sacredness as they are in the United States of America." According to Thurber, baseball, prize-fighting, horse- racing, bicycling, and bowling have acted as substitutes for sex. The female developed and perfected the "Diversion Subterfuge" to put Man in his place. "Its first manifestation was fudge-making." In the 1950s Thurber published modern fairy tales for children, The 13 Clocks (1950) and The Wonderful O (1957), which both were hugely successful. Thurber's children's tales display a cynical undercurrent, and show at times a great deal of bitterness. Truman Capote also worked at the New Yorker , but according to his reminiscences he was a general dogsbody, who helped Thurber to and from meetings, or escorted Thurber to his trysts with one of the magazine's secretaries. Thurber had already in 1933 left The New Yorker staff, but remained still its contributor. His eyesight became worse in the 1940s, and by the 1950s his blindness was nearly total. Thurber continued to compose stories in his head, and he played himself in 88 performances of the play A Thurber Carnival . He received a Litt.D. in 1950 from Kenyon College, one from Yale in 1953, and an L.H.D. (honorary) from Williams College in 1951. In later years he lived with his wife at West Cornwall, Connecticut. He suffered from alcoholism and depression, but Helen's devoted nursing enabled him to maintain his literary production. His drinking companions included the actor Humphrey Bogart, who read more widely than just the scripts. Bogart had Thurber's The Middle Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze on his bookshelf and cartoon "Jolly Times" on the wall in his Hollywood home. In 1958 the editors of Punch magazine gave a luncheon in Thurber's honor. James Thurber died of a blood clot on the brain on November 2, 1961, in New York. During his career Thurber experimented with many types of writing. He said that his ideas were influenced by the Mid-western atmosphere of Columbus, movies, and comic strips. Thurber's wry humor showed great sensitivity to human fears and follies. His observations had often a timeless, aphoristic quality. "Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead," he said in Fables for Our Time (1940). His poor eyesight was several times the source of surrealistic misunderstandings, which found their way into his writings. "The kingdom of the partly blind is little like Oz, a little like Wonderland," he wrote. "Anything you can think of, and a lot you would never think of, can happen there." Thurber also was inspired by confusion with language as in the story 'The Black Magic of Barney Haller' (1935), where his handyman Haller's linguistic innovations startle him more than the thunder. "Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity," he once said. Thurber's misogynist theme of war between men and women has been criticized by his feminist readers. Thurber's story 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' was taken up by psychologist. 'Walter Mitty Syndrome' was put forward in a British medical journal as a clinical condition, which manifested itself in compulsive fantasizing. The title character is a meek, mild-mannered husband, who escapes his everyday existence in heroic fantasies. "Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?" he says to Mrs. Mitty. "I'm going to take your temperature when I get you home," she says. The character inspired 's movie of 1947, in which Boris Karloff played Dr. Hugo Hollingshead, a psychiatrist. The Male Animal (1939), a satire of athlete worship, was written with Elliott Nugent, who featured in the 1940 Broadway play as a jealous college professor, whose wife is warming up to an old football star. The play co-starred , Leon Ames, and Don DeFore. In the film adaption from 1942 played the role. A musical version, produced by Warner Bros. and directed by H. Bruce Humberstone, was made in 1952, starring Ronald Reagan as the professor and Virginia Mayo as a stripper who aspires to become a writer. Thurber's short pieces have been adapted more than dozen times for TV. In addition to his fame as writer, Thurber was a highly respected artist and cartoonist as well. His surreal, minimalist sketches were regular features of the New Yorker , where they became prototypes of the sophisticated cartoons. Thurber did not consider himself an artist, but his "non-mastery of line" has been compared to that of Matisse. Thurber was also a passionate letter writer. A collection of his letters, edited by Harrison Kinney and Rosemary A. Thurber, was published in 2003. Selected works: Nightingale: A Musical Comedy in 2 Acts, 1924 Is Sex Necessary?, 1929 (with E.B. White) The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities, 1931 (illustrated. by James Thurber) The Seal in the Bedroom & Other Predicaments, 1932 (with an introduction by Dorothy Parker) My Life and Hard Times, 1933 - film: Rise and Shine, 1941, dir. by Allan Dawn, screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz, starring Jack Oakie, George Murphy, Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, Milton Berle The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, 1935 Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces, 1937 Cream of Thurber, 1939 The Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures, 1939 The Male Animal: A Comedy in Three Acts, 1939 (play, with Elliott Nugent) - films: The Male Animal, 1942, dir. by Elliot Nugent, screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Stephen Morehouse Avery, starring Henry Fonda, , Joan Leslie, Jack Carson, Hattie McDaniel; She's Working Her Way Through College, 1952, dir. by H. Bruce Humberstone, screenplay Peter Milne, starring Virginia Mayo, Ronald Reagan, Phyllis Thaxter, Gene Nelson, Don DeFore; The Male Animal, TV drama 1958, dir. by Vincent Donohue, starring Andy Griffith, Ann Rutherford, Edmond O'Brien, Charles Ruggles; The Male Animal, BBC Play of the Month, 1968, dir. by Alan Bridges, starring Lee Montague, Anthony Perkins and Tony Robins Fables for Our Time, and Famous Poems, 1940 (illustrated. by James Thurber) My World and Welcome to It, 1942 (includes the story 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty') - films: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, 1947, dir. Norman Z. McLeod, story by James Thurber, starring Danny Kaye , Virginia Mayo, Boris Karloff; The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, 2013, dir. by Ben Stiller, starring Ben Stiller, Sean Penn and Kristen Wiig Thurber's Men, Women, and Dogs: A Book of Drawings, 1943 (with a preface by Dorothy Parker) Many Moons, 1943 (illustrated by Louis Slobodkin) The Great Quillow, 1944 (illustrated by Doris Lee) - film: Quillow and the Giant, in NBC Children's Theatre, 1963, dir. by David Barnhizer, starring George Latshaw and Win Stracke The White Deer, 1945 (illustrated by the author and Don Freeman) The Thurber Carnival, 1945 (illustrated by James Thurber) The Beast in Me and Other Animals, 1948 The 13 Clocks, 1950 (illustrated by Mark Simont) - The Thirteen Clocks, in The Motorola Television Hour, dir. by Don Richardson, starring Cedric Hardwicke, Alice Pearce and Roberta Peters The Thurber Album: A New Collection of Pieces about People, 1952 Thurber Country: A New Collection of Pieces about Males and Females, Mainly of Our Own Species, 1953 Thurber Dogs: A Collection of the Master’s Dogs, Written and Drawn, Real and Imaginary, Living and Long Ago, 1955 A Thurber Garland, 1955 Further Fables for Our Time, 1956 The Wonderful O, 1957 (illustrated by Marc Simont) Alarms and Diversions, 1957 The Years With Ross, 1959 (with drawings by the author) Lanterns and Lances, 1961 Credos and Curios, 1962 (edited by Helen W. Thurber) Vintage Thurber, 1963 (2 vols.) Thurber & Company, 1966 (introd. by Helen W. Thurber) Selected Letters of James Thurber, 1981 (edited by Helen W. Thurber & Edward Weeks) The Works of James Thurber: Complete and Unabridged, 1985 Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor, and Himself, 1989 (edited by Michael J. Rosen) Conversations with James Thurber, 1989 (edited by Thomas Fensch) People Have More Fun Than Anybody: A Centennial Celebration of Drawings and Writings by James Thurber: Being a Hundred or So . 1994 (edited by Michael J. Rosen) James Thurber: Writings and Drawings, 1996 The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom and Surprising Life of James Thurber, 2002 (edited by Harrison Kinney, with Rosemary A. Thurber) Some rights reserved Petri Liukkonen (author) & Ari Pesonen. Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjasto 2008. James Thurber. J ames Grover Thurber (December 8, 1894 – November 2, 1961) was an American cartoonist, author, humorist, journalist, playwright, children’s book author, and celebrated wit. He was best known for his cartoons and short stories published mainly in The New Yorker magazine, such as “The Catbird Seat”, and collected in his numerous books. He was one of the most popular humorists of his time, as he celebrated the comic frustrations and eccentricities of ordinary people. He wrote the Broadway comedy The Male Animal in collaboration with his college friend Elliott Nugent; it was later adapted into a film starring Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland. His short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” has been adapted for film twice, once in 1947 and again in 2013. Birth Name: James Grover Thurber. Awards: Tony Award for “A Thurber Carnival” (1960) Genre: short stories, cartoons, essays. Birth Place: Columbus, Ohio, U.S. Death Place: New York City, U.S. Source: Wikipedia. James Thurber quotes : Love is what you've been through with somebody. James Thurber. Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone? James Thurber. Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else? James Thurber. Progress was all right. Only it went on too long. James Thurber. Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness. James Thurber. Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man. James Thurber. Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear. James Thurber. But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep? James Thurber. The most dangerous food is wedding cake. James Thurber. The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess. James Thurber. The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it. James Thurber. James Thurber. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. James Thurber , in full James Grover Thurber , (born December 8, 1894, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.—died November 2, 1961, New York City, New York), American writer and cartoonist, whose well-known and highly acclaimed writings and drawings picture the urban man as one who escapes into fantasy because he is befuddled and beset by a world that he neither created nor understands. Thurber attended the Ohio State University from 1913 to 1918 and left without taking a degree. He held several newspaper jobs before going in 1926 to New York City, where he was a reporter for the Evening Post. In 1927 he joined Harold Ross’s newly established magazine, The New Yorker, as managing editor and staff writer, making a substantial contribution to setting its urbane tone. He was later to write an account of his associates there in The Years with Ross (1959). His first published drawing in the magazine appeared in 1931. He considered himself primarily a writer and had been offhand about his sketches. But his friend, the essayist E.B. White, noticed their worth and had them used as illustrations for their jointly written Is Sex Necessary? (1929), a spoof on the then-popular earnest, pseudoscientific approach to sex. Thurber’s stock characters—the snarling wife, her timid, hapless husband, and a roster of serene, silently observing animals—have become classics of urban mythology. After Thurber left The New Yorker staff in 1933, he remained a leading contributor. In 1940, failing eyesight, the result of a boyhood accident (he had lost use of his left eye at age 6), forced him to curtail his drawing, and by 1952 he had to give it up altogether as his blindness became nearly total. My Life and Hard Times (1933) is a whimsical group of autobiographical pieces; a similar collection of family sketches appeared later in The Thurber Album (1952). Walter Mitty, the henpecked, daydreaming hero in the short story “ The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” is Thurber’s quintessential urban man. That story became Thurber’s best-known. It was first published in The New Yorker in 1939 and was collected in My World—and Welcome to It (1942). A film version starring Danny Kaye was released in 1947, and another film adaptation, directed by and starring Ben Stiller, came out in 2013. The stories in Thurber’s Fables for Our Time (1940) are deceptively simple and charming in style yet unflinchingly clear-sighted in their appraisal of human foibles. A play, The Male Animal (1941), written with Elliott Nugent, is a plea for academic freedom as well as a comedy. His fantasies for children, The 13 Clocks (1950) and The Wonderful O (1957), are among the most successful fairy tales of modern times. The Thurber Carnival (1945), a collection of his writings and drawings, was adapted for the stage in 1960, with Thurber playing himself. A further collection, Credos and Curios, was published posthumously in 1962. This article was most recently revised and updated by Richard Pallardy, Research Editor. Further Fables for Our Time. Please enter a suggested description. Limit the size to 1000 characters. However, note that many search engines truncate at a much shorter size, about 160 characters. Your suggestion will be processed as soon as possible. Author Bio for Thurber, James. James Grover Thurber (December 8, 1894 – November 2, 1961) was an American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright, and celebrated wit. Thurber was best known for his cartoons and short stories, published mainly in The New Yorker magazine and collected in his numerous books. One of the most popular humorists of his time, Thurber celebrated the comic frustrations and eccentricities of ordinary people. In collaboration with his college friend, Elliott Nugent, he wrote the Broadway comedy, The Male Animal, later adapted into a film, which starred Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland. Many of his short stories are humorous fictional memoirs from his life, but he also wrote darker material, such as "The Whip-Poor-Will", a story of madness and murder. His best-known short stories are "The Dog That Bit People" and "The Night the Bed Fell"; they can be found in My Life and Hard Times, which was his "break-out" book. Among his other classics are The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Catbird Seat, A Couple of Hamburgers, The Greatest Man in the World, If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox. The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze has several short stories with a tense undercurrent of marital discord. The book was published the year of his divorce and remarriage. His 1941 story "You Could Look It Up", about a three-foot adult being brought in to take a walk in a baseball game, is said to have inspired Bill Veeck's stunt with Eddie Gaedel with the St. Louis Browns in 1951. Veeck claimed an older provenance for the stunt, but was certainly aware of the Thurber story.--Wikipedia. Available Formats. FILE TYPE LINK UTF-8 text 20130335.txt HTML 20130335.html Epub 20130335.epub If you cannot open a .mobi file on your mobile device, please use .epub with an appropriate eReader. Mobi/Kindle 20130335.mobi Not all Kindles or Kindle apps open all .mobi files. PDF (tablet) 20130335-a5.pdf HTML Zip 20130335-h.zip. This book is in the public domain in Canada, and is made available to you DRM-free. You may do whatever you like with this book, but mostly we hope you will read it. Here at FadedPage and our companion site Distributed Proofreaders Canada, we pride ourselves on producing the best ebooks you can find. Please tell us about any errors you have found in this book, or in the information on this page about this book. The Thurber Letters. James Thurber was one of the great American humorists of the 20th century. From his first appearance in the fledgling New Yorker in 1927 until his death in 1961, he was known for his unique reflections in prose and pictures on what he called "human confusion, American-style." These laugh-out-loud critiques of love, marriage, sex, literature and history made him a favorite with readers. As the largest single collection of his correspondence, The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber reveals that his life and his art were, for the most part, separate. Harrison Kinney, author of the definitive 1995 Thurber biography James Thurber: His Life and Times , edits the collection with Rosemary A. Thurber, Thurber's only child. As Kinney writes, "Very little of his personal life . . . can be surmised from what he wrote for publication. It is his letters . . . that comprise a reliable and fascinating portrait of Thurber, the man and artist, and offer a vivid understanding of what largely motivated his remarkable prose and art." This fascinating volume includes letters to his family in Ohio and to his wide circle of literary friends, including his New Yorker colleagues. Among the latter, the most memorable letters include his missives to Harold Ross, the legendary editor with whom Thurber had a decades-long ambivalent relationship. A wonderful example is an undated letter in which Thurber strongly objects to changes made in his copy. "Since I never write, for publication, a single word or phrase that I have not consciously examined, sometimes numerous times, I should like to have the queriers on my pieces realize that there is no possibility of catching me on an overlooked sloppiness." There are many letters to Thurber's good friends E.B. and Katharine White, and letters to Rosemary that reveal him to be a devoted parent. Some of the most entertaining items are Thurber's responses to students and other people he does not know who have written to him for advice. The letters appear chronologically, so we can trace Thurber's development from a 23-year-old code clerk in Washington and Paris in 1918 through several years as a newspaper reporter and columnist and his eventual employment by Ross in 1927 as managing editor of The New Yorker . From his perspective, we learn of his sticky relationship with the magazine, primarily with regard to proper payment for his work and the rejection of numerous submissions he made to it. His adventures as an author of books and co-author of The Male Animal , a successful comedy on Broadway, are also included. From the earliest letters to the last, Thurber impresses us with his gift for language and his sheer joy in writing. He can be chatty, as in letters to his family; focused on concerns at the magazine, as he was with Ross and many others; opinionated, as when writing to Malcolm Cowley in the 1930s about his dislike of "literary communists"; or witty, as in his response to an invitation to appear on the radio program "This I Believe" in 1953: "my belief changes from time to time and might even change during a brief broadcast." Whatever the occasion, Thurber never fails to write in such a way that readers are caught up in what he has to say. Anyone interested in Thurber's life and work or who would like an insider's view on the workings of a great American magazine should enjoy this collection immensely. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a regular contributor to BookPage.