Writings & Drawings by James Thurber

This is the fourth of four posts on the big '90s Writings & Drawings omnibus of James Thurber's work, assembled about thirty years ago by Garrison Keillor and containing mostly excerpts from the books Thurber published during his life. Because the book is a thousand pages long, I took it in chunks: first The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times (plus some other material), then The Last Flower (plus other material), and then The 13 Clocks (yes, plus some other material).

This home-stretch of Writings & Drawings covers almost three hundred pages and the 1950s, the last decade of Thurber's life. It has some new pieces from the mostly-reprint collections The Thurber Album and Thurber Country, the introduction from Thurber's Dogs, five pieces from Further Fables for Our Time, one from Alarms and Diversions, six chapters from his New Yorker memoir The Years with Ross, and a small collection of uncollected work from earlier in his career.

It's more Thurber, mostly, from the era when he had become a household name - the titles of his collections show that clearly - and when his eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer draw. Like a lot of successful writers late in their careers, there's a lot of looking back in these pieces - essays about his great-aunt and his mother; one titled "The First Time I Saw Paris," in the mode that a few dozen other American writers essayed in the first half of the 20th century; the whole book about Harold Ross, creator and first editor of The New Yorker - which are pleasant but not core Thurber, to my mind.

Otherwise, it is much of the same kind of thing. The Further Fables are in the same tone and manner as the first batch of fables a decade and a half earlier. There are a handful of Thurberesque amusements, including "File and Forget," one of those sequence-of-letters pieces in which the main character can't get out of an increasingly-unpleasant situation; "Do You Want to Make Something Out of It?," about a word-game played at parties with friends; and the literary-criticism-adjacent "A Final Note on Chanda Bell."

The uncollected pieces are all fairly short, but strong - there's a reworking of the Clement-Clark Moore "A Night Before Christmas" into pseudo-Hemingway, and a kidnappee-charms-the-kidnappers story, and a couple of bits of Thurberesque "I'm no good at everyday life" pieces, with one about broadcasting and one actually titled "I Break Everything I Touch."

Looking at the book as a whole, it is still an excellent, well-rounded introduction to Thurber, even after thirty years. My sense is that it contains maybe half of his total published work, maybe slightly less. But my sense is also that there are a lot of Thurber This and Thurber That books from the second half of his career that overlap quite a bit, and no Grand Unified Thurber to seek out with everything. So my recommendation is still roughly the same. If you think you want to read all of Thurber, or want something not quite as daunting, grab, say, The Thurber Carnival or maybe My Life and Hard Times. But if you want a big book with all the Thurber most people will ever need, this is the one.