Description
Good dust jacket is green with red border, red and black lettering on front, photo of James Thurber on back panel, worn at corners, toning to spine, and some edge-wear and soiling on spine. Near Fine binding is rust colored paper over boards with black and gold decorated cloth backed spine. Gilt design on front cover, gilt lettering on spine. Slight toning to inside front cover. Frontispiece photo of Harold W. Ross. Line drawn illustrations by James Thurber. The binding is tight and pages are clean. A Book of the Month Club selection. The book measures 8.5″ tall x 5.8″ wide.
About the book (from the dust jacket)
If you get Ross down on paper,”‘ Wolcott Gibbs warned James Thurber, “nobody will believe it. But readers of THE YEARS WITH Ross will find that they do believe it They come to know in hilarious detail the man who founded the New Yorker, was its editor from 1925 to 1951, and gave a whole new dimension to American art and letters, The talented writers and artists Ross gathered for his new magazine-Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Ogden Nash, Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, Charles Addams, John McNulty, Dorothy Parker, Wolcott Gibbs, to name but a few-flash through these pages. But of them all, only James Thurber could have written so turbulent and affectionate an account of what it meant to spend twenty-five years on the staff of this “irascible genius.”” Here is Ross as seen by his most intimate associates. Here is the gaiety, the excitement of Manhattan itself.
About the author/illustrator (from the dust jacket)
James Thurber approaching his mid-sixties, is a tall, spare figure with unruly white hair, notable in a crowd. He is casually but elegantly turned out. He has an extraordinarily youthful quality in his manner, and in the bite and vitality of his conversation. Blinded in one eye while playing Indians as a boy, he was dogged by progressive loss of vision in the other until 1947, when he began to lose his sight altogether and could no longer draw.
Thurber describes himself as “cartoonist, writer, playwright,’ in that order, but his prestige throughout the English-speaking world is primarily as a man of letters, author of upwards of twenty books. He spent eighteen months writing THE YEARS WITH Ross, and his prose is just as muscular, as assured and as carefully polished today as it was when he could read and see what he was doing.
