In my (seemingly) never ending completist quest, I finally got around to getting hold of the Armed Services edition of James Thurber’s & Elliot Nugent’s The Male Animal (as recently as last month I mentioned the edition here). You can see by the cover that the book was bundled with four others. Still a longish way to go, completist-wise, collecting
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The below arrived in yesterday’s mail, contributed to the archive courtesy of a friend of the Spill (thank you, friend of the Spill!) I’ve written about a number of WWII era overseas New Yorker and Thurber books, but have never seen this Male Animal program before. It’s printed on thin paper and measures 4″ x 4 1/2″. Amazing it has
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Music isn’t mentioned too often on this site, but I can’t resist talking, for a moment, about two songs that James Thurber was especially fond of. According to Thurber biographer, Harrison Kinney, “Bye Bye Blackbird” “remained Thurber’s favorite [song] from the day it emerged in in the mid-twenties.”* Another contender: the less well known “Who.” According to Kinney, “Who” is
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Today I point you to Stephen Nadler’s fab site, Attempted Bloggery to see a rare program (provided by Scott Burns) for a production of The Male Animal staged in wartime Paris at The Madeleine Theater. Ohio State roomies (and life-long friends) James Thurber & Elliott Nugent collaborated, post-college, on the comedy, which became a successful Broadway play
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