The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities

The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780060803513.

James Thurber was perhaps the most popular humorist of the first part of the 20th century in the USA. The 1931 collection, THE OWL IN THE ATTIC, that I picked up at a library sale, shows him at his peak as a writer who draws (as opposed to an artist who writes). The book is divided into three sections of essays. There’s “Mr and Mrs Monroe”, a series of vignettes about a young married couple in New York City. This is Thurber at his most familiar, dealing frankly with the battle of the sexes, depicted here more as a series of friendly skirmishes than as the more misanthropic wars he’d depict later in his career. Oddly, none of the accompanying illustrations depicted the couple themselves. There’s “Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Guide To Modern English Usage”, a series of fractured essays where Thurber twists the rules of grammar in highly inappropriate ways. This is Thurber torturing the English language to hilarious ends, but the accompanying illustrations don’t have all that much to do with the actual essays.