Description
Very Good+ dust jacket has a small illustration of couple dancing, black and blue lettering, very slight edge rub wear, price clipped, a mylar dust jacket has been added. Very Good+ binding is tan paper over boards, blue cloth-backed. Illustration of boys face in silver, silver lettering on spine. Gift inscription on front free end paper dated 12/25/81. Small sticker on inside rear cover. Line illustrations throughout. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 9.5″ tall x 6.6″ wide.
About the book (from the dust jacket)
The creator of Walter Mitty and the Thurber Dog, of the Seal in the Bedroom and the Unicorn in the Garden, James Thurber counted among his friends many of the most distinguished literary and theatrical figures of his time. He wrote hugely entertaining letters to and about them, the best of which are gathered here.
Thurber’s letters were sent from London, Paris, Bermuda, New York, and Connecticut; they went to Harold Ross, E. B. White, and John O’Hara, to friends from his Columbus, Ohio, boyhood, to magazine editors, to his eye surgeon. They include anecdotes about Thurber’s friends and acquaintances among New Yorker writers (Wolcott Gibbs, Joe! Sayre, Frank Sullivan) and about the legendary Algonquin group (Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Wbollcott). There are announcements of Thurber`s “discovery” of Peter De Vries and Kenneth Tynan, notes on encounters with F Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot (who smoked Kools, Thurber observed), Noel Coward, Robert Sherwood, Fred Allen, and the Marx others. There are gripes, reminiscences, many stories, literary feuds, and progress Ports that contain the beginnings of what were to become some of Thurber’s best-known irks. The section “Mr. Thurber Regrets” is a sampling of Thurber’s responses to the words of letters from “publishers, agents, 90 professors, sick people, crazy people, children, and old ladies,” against whose petitions Thurber stoutly defended his privacy, always gracefully, often hilariously.
From a mass of correspondence, Helen Thurber, the author’s widow, and Edward Weeks, Thurber’s editor at The Atlantic and friend, have selected over a hundred letters, generously illustrating them with Thurber men, women, and dogs. They cover the period of 1935 to 1961, from Thurber’s confident prime as a writer and artist, to his last days, when blindness and infirmity failed to quench the exuberance of his spirit or of his prose. Happily, Thurber did not reserve his best writing for publication; this collection is by turns cantankerous, revealing, and compassionate, as good as the best of vintage Thurber.
