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Thurber, James

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty; My Life and Hard Times, [16] 69

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20221201101833 Alastair Glegg on fairy tales for grown ups, Slightly Foxed Issue 76

Twice Upon a Time

Alastair Glegg on fairy tales for grown-ups

Starting a story with ‘Once upon a time’ does not guarantee a happy ending. In their classic collection of folk tales, the rather aptly named Brothers Grimm made sure there was a moral to every story: goodness is rewarded, evil is punished, sometimes quite brutally. Even Hans Christian Andersen’s stories do not all end happily ever after: the prince who disguised himself as a swineherd to test the princess’s devotion came to despise her and returned alone to his own little kingdom.
20071201163717 Derek Parker on James Thurber, Slightly Foxed Issue 16

Praisethurber

Derek Parker on James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty; My Life and Hard Times

Not too many years ago, it would have been unnecessary to explain who James Thurber was. His short story ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’, published in 1947 in the New Yorker (where most of his writing first appeared), soon found an international audience, and despite the best efforts of Danny Kaye to kill it off in a truly appalling film, it remains one of the most adept pieces of comic writing of its time, with most of the classic Thurber trademarks, including his delight in inventing words: among them the pseudomedical terms ‘obstreosis of the ductal tract’ and ‘streptothricosis’, and the information that ‘Coreopsis has set in’.

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