His weak male characters do hate strong women, but the men are often weak because they accept the world in which their secret fantasies are necessary and, therefore, leave their women no choice but to try to hold things together. In fact, it seems that critics’ opinions regarding Thurber’s attitudes about most subjects vary from one text to the next, but certain themes seem to remain consistent. He loses and loses and loses his combats with machines, women, and animals until defeat becomes permanent.” Although Tobias sees women as vital forces in Thurber’s work, Hill and Blair see Thurber as essentially a misogynist bewailing the end of the ideal of male freedom best portrayed in 1950’s Western film and pathetically reflected in the fantasies of Walter Mitty.

Tobias argues that Thurber comically celebrates the life of the mind: “Thurber’s victory is a freedom within law that delights and surprises.” Blair and Hill, in America’s Humor (1978), see Thurber as a sort of black humorist laughing at his own destruction, “a humorist bedeviled by neuroses, cowed before the insignificant things in his world, and indifferent to the cosmic ones. Tobias on the one hand and the team of Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill on the other. The poles are well represented by Richard C. There is disagreement among critics as to the drift of the attitudes and themes reflected in James Thurber’s work.

Thurber seemed to prefer to work on the borderlines between conventional forms. As a result, most of his writings can be treated as short fiction. Many of his first-person autobiographical sketches are known to be “fact” rather than fiction only through careful biographical research. His “memoirs” in My Life and Hard Times are clearly fictionalized. His essays frequently employ stories and are “fictional” in recognizable ways. To discuss Thurber as an artist in the short-story form is difficult, however, because of the variety of things he did that might legitimately be labeled short stories. James Thurber (Decem– November 2, 1961) is best known as the author of humorous sketches, stories, and reminiscences dealing with urban bourgeois American life.

Many moons by james thurber summary