The shy Midwesterner James Thurber became a famed cartoonist and humor writer almost, it seems, by accident: Thurber in person was often depressed and self-conscious, darker strains that emerge fitfully in his sly, absurdist work. Garrison Keillor, a sunnier brand of Midwestern humorist, has assembled four longer works with many of Thurber's drawings and short pieces for the Library of America edition of Thurber's selected works. Many of these cartoons and writings are now classics, and Thurber's edgy, modernist humor--not to mention his usually bewildered protagonists--has influenced many of the best cartoonists today.


From Library Journal
This work represents each decade of Thurber's writing career, from the slight New Yorker sketches of the 1920s to the irreverently affectionate portrait of that magazine's founder, The Years with Ross, of the late 1950s. Keillor's selection of Thurber's oeuvre is both the most generous and the most judicious volume available. Known largely for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1939), which dramatizes the battle of the sexes and the male animal's ineptitude in the face of modern technology, Thurber was an Algonquin stylist with a wide range of talents. These talents are effectively displayed here in the self-deprecating reminiscences of his eccentric Columbus, Ohio, family; beast fables with a cutting edge; and almost 500 inimitable line drawings. A valuable work; highly recommended for all libraries.?Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Lynn Karpen
A first-rate chronology accompanies the collection, which retells, among other things, the story of how Thurber, renowned for his zaniness and skewed world view, suffered throughout his life from depression and anxiety.


From Booklist
American humorists have always helped define American culture by satirizing its more absurd habits of mind, fads, and institutions. James Thurber (1894^-1961) is one of the giants in this fine tradition, and now the entire scope of his sharp wit and poignant whimsy is gathered together in this invaluable volume. Selected by Garrison Keillor, a Thurber soul-mate if ever there was one, these stories, parodies, reminiscences, cartoons, and drawings present Thurber's unique and masterful take on work, psychotherapy, fantasizing, domesticity, and the battle between the sexes. The volume includes the now classic "Secret Life of Walter Mitty," the unforgettable images of The Seal in the Bedroom, and his autobiography, My Life and Hard Times, as well as a number of previously uncollected pieces. A painstaking writer, Thurber found release in the spontaneity of his drawings, and the dynamic contrast between the ironic intensity of his prose and the quicksilver inventiveness of his cartoons is intrinsic to the power of his work. Donna Seaman


Midwest Book Review
James Thurber's wit and deadpan humor have been collected in over 1,000 pages that feature over 100 pieces, including "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty". There are also 500 wonderful drawings, and rounding out this anthology is a selection from "The Years with Ross" (a memoir of the New Yorker publisher) and a number of wonderful early pieces never collected by Thurber. James Thurber: Writings And Drawings is highly recommended for personal and public library collections.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Library of America and editor Garrison Keillor present the best and most extensive Thurber collection ever assembled. Only a book of this scope can do justice to Thurber's extraordinary career and to the many unexpected turns of his comic genius. Here are the acknowledged masterpieces: "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," "The Catbird Seat," the anti-war parable The Last Flower, the brilliantly satirical Fables for Our Time, the children's classic The 13 Clocks, and My Life and Hard Times. Here too are the best pieces from The Owl in the Attic, Let Your Mind Alone!, My World - And Welcome To It, and The Beast in Me and Other Animals, and his other famous collections, including such favorites as "The Pet Department," "The Black Magic of Barney Haller," "Nine Needles," "The Macbeth Murder Mystery," and "File and Forget": an astonishingly diverse mix of literary parodies, eccentric portraits, stories of domestic warfare and inner terror, reminiscences both tender and farcical, extravagant feats of wordplay, freewheeling burlesques of popular culture (from detective novels to self-help fads), and exasperated protests against the mechanized impersonality of the modern world. Thurber's wonderful drawings - spontaneous creations of which he once said, "I don't think any drawing ever took me more than three minutes" - are here in profusion, with their population of husbands, wives, dogs, seals, and various species of Thurber's own invention. His first great cartoon collection, The Seal in the Bedroom, is presented complete, along with celebrated sequences like "The Masculine Approach" and "The War Between Men and Women" and his devastatingly straightforward illustrated versions of once-canonical poems such as "Barbara Frietchie" and "Excelsior." Rounding out the volume is a selection from The Years with Ross, his memoir of New Yorker publisher Harold Ross, and a number of pieces uncollected by Thurber, including a few wonderful early ones never before reprinted.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal