People Have More Fun Than Anybody: A Centennial Celebration of Drawings and Writings by James Thurber - Hardcover

Thurber, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151000948 ISBN 13: 9780151000944

Publisher: Harcourt, 1994

Synopsis

In this centennial volume of previously uncollected work, James Thurber continues to flourish. Here is the pleasure of recognizing this comic genius at work again, with his suspicious, civilized, unsettling wit. Included are eighteen prose pieces and over seventy-five drawings by the only cartoonist who could claim to draw "abstract things like despair, disillusion, despondency, sorrow, lapse of memory, exile . . . sometimes in a shape that might be called Man or Woman." Here are drawings with such contemporary smarts that they still sting, including dozens of reports from the front line in that cold war between the sexes.
This is Thurber at his most entertaining, praising things canine in two marvelous tributes, musing over the promises of mail sweepstakes, confessing his aversion to anything mechanical, puzzling over the animal kingdom's curious uprisings, reconsidering the value of Byrd's claiming of the icy lands of Antarctica ("Are we landowners or ice dealers? Are we men or penguins?"), and observing the fate of sex. For good measure, Michael Rosen offers the recipe for Thurber's favorite birthday cake, the Never-Fail Devil's Food.

About this title

About the Author:

James Thurber (1894—1961), one of the outstanding American humorists and cartoonists of the twentieth century, was born in Columbus, Ohio, and launched his professional writing career as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch in 1920. He began writing for The New Yorker in 1927 after his friend E. B. White got him a job at the magazine. Though hampered by failing eyesight, Thurber wrote nearly forty books, including collections of essays, short stories, fables, and children’s stories. He won a Tony Award for his popular Broadway play, A Thurber Carnival.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Thurber seems to have had more fun than most, and this is a thoroughly enjoyable menagerie of some of his congenially barbed cartoons and comic essays. The beauty of Thurber's writing lies in the way he applies a perfect parody of elevated, didactic prose in the service of decidedly unelevated subjects. Consider ``The Story of the Bicycle,'' which begins: ``Although the bicycle has not multiplied anywhere near as rapidly as the rabbit, it must be borne in mind that in the beginning there was only one bicycle whereas there were two rabbits.'' And expressing anxiety over all the ice the nation had come to possess after Admiral Byrd's Antarctic expedition, Thurber demands: ``Are we landowners or ice dealers? Are we men or penguins? Let us face these questions soberly.'' -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0151000948
• ISBN 13: 9780151000944
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 169
• Editor: Rosen Michael J.