James Thurber (1894–1961) was one of the preeminent American
humorists and cartoonists of the twentieth century. Most famous for
his widely anthologized short story “The Secret Life of Walter
Mitty,” he was a contributor to The New Yorker for more than thirty
years and wrote nearly forty books—collections of essays, short
stories, fables, and children’s stories, including The 13 Clocks
and the Caldecott Medal winner Many Moons.
Marc Simont (illustrations; 1915–2013) illustrated nearly a
hundred books, among them James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks and a 1990
edition of Thurber’s Many Moons. He worked with such authors as
Marjorie Weinman Sharmat (on the Nate the Great series) and
Margaret Wise Brown and won both a Caldecott Honor and a Caldecott
Medal for his illustrations of children’s books.
Ransom Riggs (introduction) is the author of the
multimillion-copy #1 New York Times bestseller Miss
Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children—now a major motion picture
by Tim Burton—as well as its bestselling sequels Hollow City and
Library of Souls and the companion volume Tales of the Peculiar. He
grew up in Florida and now lives in Los Angeles.
“A perfect book for children and one every thinking adult should
read. It’s a timeless story that can be read as a commentary on
world affairs a half century ago, but that feels absolutely (and
sadly) relevant today. . . . It accomplishes feat after feat of
linguistic acrobatics: Not quite poetry, not quite prose, O is ear
candy.” —Ransom Riggs, from the Introduction
“No one else could think up a fairy story, tale, legend, exercise,
or what have you, based upon ‘O’ alone. Certainly no one else could
bring it off if he had. Mr. Thurber, however, can, did, and does.
No more worthy ‘O’ words could go before The Wonderful O than
another O Wonderful.” —The New York Times
“A prodigious performance. As a medium in the great séance of
letters [Thurber] is incomparable; he has only to utter an
incantatory moan, and words levitate, phrases rap out unexpected
messages, and whole sentences turn into ectoplasm.” —The New
Yorker
“A tale for children, and a reminder for adults, of the joys of
love, liberty, language, and, not least, humor. It has pirates and
treasure and magic and a message that especially in complacent
times must not be forgotten. . . . The Wonderful O is a book worth
finding, wherever you can, and reading, as one of its characters
concludes, ‘lest we forget.’” —The Wall Street Journal
“The loveliest and liveliest of parables. The end is a real
surprise.” —Harper’s Magazine
“Hilarious . . . Thurber uses humor to explore what becomes of a
society when something we use to communicate—to understand and to
be understood—is taken away.” —The Weekly Standard
“Full of word lists and wordplay, with charming illustrations by
Marc Simont, it is a verbally ambitious little classic for
logophiles. Or, as the pirate would have it, lgphiles.” —The Sunday
Times (London)
“Excellent Thurber. Besides being a highly original fairy tale and
a rollicking linguistic gambol, The Wonderful O is a still further
fable for our time—perhaps the best and most serious that Thurber
has written.” —New York Herald Tribune Book Review
“Perhaps the worthiest contemporary fabulist in English.
[Thurber’s] effects are almost musical. He gets us to laugh and
gulp down another lesson in the value of human liberty at one and
the same time.” —San Francisco Examiner
“Pure and unadulterated Thurber, and that means Thurber at his
zaniest. Not since Lewis Carroll has such foolishness masked such
wisdom; and besides, it’s a gale of fun from start to finish.” —St.
Louis Globe-Democrat
“While ostensibly for children who will love its wit, its rhythms,
and its free-flowing imagination, it will speak irresistibly to
older minds and funnybones and, one might add, hearts.” —Boston
Herald
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