Praise for Thurber and His Fables

“Herein lie great words and lines of wit and wisdom as might be read by a father to a son, or, for that matter, a mother to a father while a daughter stands with arms folded and a knowing look. How grateful I am that my dad read me Thurber, otherwise I’d know nothing of these fables and have no suitable way to bide my time until our current nightmares tumble from a careless window.”

—Elvis Costello

“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

“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.”

—Michael McKean

“Thurber’s genius was to make of our despair a humorous fable.”

—John Updike, 1956

“It was Whitman who wanted to turn and live with the animals; it is Thurber who has succeeded in the only possible terms, by enlisting them in the endless battle for human sanity.”

—Manchester Guardian (London), 1957

“Take Aesop, or La Fontaine, add a dash of lunacy, garnish with the drawing of a man whose perfect vision is undistracted by good sight and you still won’t have a Thurber fable . . . You won’t have it because a Thurber fable is unique in the most unicorn sense of the word. A Thurber fable shares that special world of humor that we identify as Thurbeia, a wispy, wacky realm somewhere between heaven and mirth, inhabited by fierce, long-haired women, by apprehensive men whom life has passed by (and in the wrong direction at that), and by the hound dog of Idealism staring confounded at the bug of Reality.”

—Evening Citizen, Ottawa, Canada, 1953

“These fables deliciously revise some of the well-known classic fables. They are illustrated by Mr. Thurber’s incomparable—and I mean incomparable—drawings. For no one fills a few crude looking lines with more laughing gas than he does.”

—Chicago Tribune, 1940

“These tiny stories, in which a wide variety of animals show us how human we really are, are completely uproarious.”

—Saturday Review of Literature, 1940

“But Thurber, the fabulist, easily engages the invaluable services of Thurber, the scratch-pad artist. These ectoplasmic figures, seemingly executed in a telephone booth between wrong numbers, enhance his Fables more dynamically than the work of any other artist could, had he had a selection from Cimabue to Margaret Bourke-White. The little figures of animals and people depict every human mood save nobility and serenity. This is no lack, since there doesn’t happen to be any serenity or nobility in the Fables.”

—Saturday Review, 1956

“Thurber is an original. Critics who call him merely the Swift of our time underrate him, because he is something special, something all himself, as important a phenomenon of our time as the World’s Fair or the World War. I wouldn’t miss one of his books for anything. But I’m warning you, the laughs in this one are mostly desperate.”

—Memphis Tennessee Appeal, 1940

“In Germany this Aesop in reverse would be burned at the stake as subversive, mad, immoral, decadent, and defeatist. He is also delightful.”

—The Nation, 1940

“[Thurber] writes so simply and so pointedly that readers find it hard to believe that there isn’t some esoteric meaning hidden under every word, and that his own illustrations—simple, often only one line drawings—are just what they look like and not a kind of ink curtain hiding all sorts of subtleties. You may not like him (though his devotees can’t understand your having such a blind spot) but anyone who says he can’t understand him is in a fog of his own making.”

—Chicago Sunday Tribune, 1956

“[Thurber’s fables] are spare, luminous, concentrated, they are Thurber’s late quartets. His conflict has moved to a higher plane, it’s no longer only man versus gadgets, or man versus woman. It’s satire versus humanism; Thurber doesn’t hate the human race, like Swift; he cares for it, and hopes, he has had a vision of paradise . . . But finally this is the distilled wisdom of the blind prophet.”

—Observer, London, 1957

“So long as Mr. Thurber continues to people our darkness with these little doodles of his, we Americans are not much in danger of losing the uses of laughter.”

—Buffalo, NY News, 1956

“Here Thurber energetically continues his huge self-assigned task of trying to kid mankind into taking itself seriously. And if he fails, it is only because mankind isn’t listening.”

—Texas News, Lufkin, 1957

“I always read my Thurber—to laugh and learn.”

—Jon Scieszka

“I was introduced to Thurber in high school, and that’s when I became a writer.”

—Roy Blount, Jr.