Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated is a 1940 book by James Thurber. Thurber updates some old fables and creates some new ones of his own too. Notably there is 'The Bear Who Could Take It Or Leave It Alone' about a bear who lapses into alcoholism before sobering up and going too far that way. (He used to say 'See what the bears in the back room will have.') Also an updated version of 'Little Red Riding Hood' which ends with the immortal lines, "even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead. " All the fables have one-line morals. The moral of 'Little Red Riding Hood' is "Young girls are not so easy to fool these days." Another fable concerns a non-materialist chipmunk who likes to arrange nuts in pretty patterns rather than just piling up as many as he can. He is constantly nagged by his chipmunk wife for this.
All fables previously appeared in The New Yorker.
Famous quotes containing the words fables, time, famous, poems and/or illustrated:
“The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
—Bible: Hebrew Ecclesiastes 9:11.
“A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black,
A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl
Make him the quaint great figure that men love,
The prairie-lawyer, master of us all.”
—Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931)
“Bernstein: “Girls delightful in Cuba stop. Could send you prose poems about scenery but don’t feel right spending your money stop. There is no war in Cuba. Signed Wheeler.” Any answer?
Charles Foster Kane: Yes—Dear Wheeler, You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1985)
“The adjustment of qualities is so perfect between men and women, and each is so necessary to the other, that the idea of inferiority is absurd.”
—“Jennie June” Croly 1829–1901, U.S. founder of the woman’s club movement, journalist, author, editor. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 204 (August 1866)