Coinciding with the 125th year of Thurber's birth in 2019, two new books of the twentieth century's best known humorist's fables and illustrations were published.
"Every sport has its Ultimate, its Greatest of All Time: Babe Ruth, Ali, Nicklaus, Pelé, Federer, The Don. The sport of creating laugh-out-loud cartoons, fables, and funny essays has Thurber. He is, and probably always will be, The One.”
—Stephen Fry
“… you can hear in every anthropomorphic character or see in every Thurber illustration, the joy of a life well laughed.”
—from the Foreword by Keith Olbermann
"Thurber celebrates the losers, the awkward, the unpopular…and yet he’s never a smug observer.”
—Tracey Ullman
“James Thurber taught me how to read. His pictures were so weirdly intriguing that I had to know more, so into the words I went, and things just got funnier. It’s one of the longest and most important relationships in my reading life.”
—actor Michael McKean
Published to coincide with the 125th anniversary of James Thurber’s birth, this treasury combines, for the first time, Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time with Thurber’s unpublished preface and ten previously uncollected or unpublished stories.
James Thurber has been called “one of the world’s greatest humorists” by Alistair Cooke (Atlantic), “one of our great American institutions” (Stanley Walker), “a magnificent satirist” (Boston Transcript)—and few works reveal Thurber’s genius as powerfully as his fables. Perennially entertaining and astutely satirical, Thurber pinpricks the idiosyncrasies of life with verbal frivolity, hilarious insights, political shrewdness, and, of course, quirky, quotable morals.
Now, readers can savor 85 fables by the twentieth century’s preeminent humorist collected for the first time in a single anthology: Fables for Our Time, Further Fables for Our Time, Thurber’s unpublished preface, and ten previously uncollected fables—illustrated by ten contemporary artists including Seymour Chwast, Mark Ulriksen, Laurie Rosenwald, and R. O. Blechman—Collected Fables is a must-have for readers of all ages.
A Mile and a Half of Lines: The Art of James Thurber is a long overdue introduction and re-introduction of James Thurber—the humorist of the twentieth century most frequently cited after Mark Twain of the nineteenth. In the early 1940s, Thurber was the best-selling American author in the world and his artwork not only graced the pages of the New Yorker, but it illustrated others’ books, advertisements, children’s books, and boutique items, from tea towels to dresses. This monograph—the first comprehensive focus on his work as an artist, cartoonist, and illustrator—includes a host of preeminent cartoonists and writers—including Ian Frazier, Seymour Chwast, and Michael Maslin—celebrating the significance of Thurber’s drawings that changed the character of the cartoon in America and presented an entirely novel, more spontaneous and untrained approach to drawing. This monograph showcases some 260 drawings and coincides with the first major retrospective of Thurber’s art presented by the Columbus Museum of Art in 2019, the 125th anniversary of Thurber’s birth. A Mile and a Half of Lines includes a wealth of visual material never seen in print before as well as classic Thurber images scanned directly from the original art.
“Thurber’s drawings dropped into the pages of the New Yorker like graphic boulders in a placid pond.” —cartoonist Michael Maslin
Other Books by James Thurber edited by Michael J. Rosen
(currently out of print)
