(continued)

Others on Thurber's writing...
E. B. White: "During his happiest years, Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes."

E. B. White: "His mind was never at rest, and his pencil was connected to his mind by the best conductive tissue I have ever seen in action."

Peter De Vries: "He was a storyteller, mimic, fantasist, realist, running commentator, and mine of information on every subject under the sun."

Malcolm Cowley: "Comedy is his chosen field, and his range of effects is deliberately limited, but within that range there is nobody who writes better than Thurber, that is, more clearly and flexibly, with a deeper feeling for the genius of language and the value of words.

Others on Thurber's drawings...
Arthur Miller: "The people in Thurber's drawings are a breed of his own discovery. Before he drew them nobody ever saw such creatures in real life. But now, once you see them, you recognize your own friends. Maybe—if you are very honest—yourself."

Dorothy Parker: "These are strange people that Mr. Thurber has turned loose upon us. They seem to fall into three classes—the playful, the defeated, and the ferocious. All of them have the outer semblance of unbaked cookies."

Dorothy Parker: "There is about all these characters, even the angry ones, a touching quality. They expect so little of life; they remember the old discouragements and await the new."

Dorothy Parker: "Of the birds and animals so bewilderingly woven into the lives of the Thurber people it is best to say but little. Those tender puppies, those faint-hearted hounds—I think they are hounds—that despondent penguin—one goes all weak with sentiment. No man could have drawn, much less thought of, those creatures unless he felt really right about animals."

E. B. White: "He is the one artist that I have ever known capable of expressing in a single drawing physical embarrassment during emotional strain. That is, it is always apparent to Thurber that at the very moment one's heart is caught in an embrace one's foot may be caught in a piano stool."

Others on Thurber's men, women, and dogs...
E. B. White: " 'Thurber men'... are frustrated, fugitive beings; at times they seem vaguely striving to get out of something without being seen (a room, a situation, a state of mind), at other times they are merely perplexed and too humble, or weak to move. The women, you will notice, are quite different: temperamentally they are much better adjusted to their surroundings than are the men, and mentally they are much less capable of making themselves uncomfortable."

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