Thurber Thursday: Run For Your Lives!…And A Louis Slobodkin Appreciation
I keep running into German Thurber titles on Ebay; most of them are new to my eyes, even though many have been around for decades. Here’s another that popped up the other day: Rette Sich, Wer Kann! (Stuttgart; Hamburg; Baden-Baden: Rowohlt, 1948).
I like the cover (how could I not!), but the title slightly confused me. Google translated Rette Sich, Wer Kann! to Run For Your Lives! My initial thinking was that the book might be a German translation of My Life and Hard Times, published in 1933 (the cover drawing appears in My Life and Hard Times (shown above, right), leading off “The Day The Dam Broke”. The drawing is titled Two Thousand People were in Full Flight (“run for your lives” does not appear in the piece).
Unable to stand the suspense, I finally consulted Edwin T. Bowden’s essential Thurber: A Bibliography and found that Rette Sich, Wer Kann! is actually The Thurber Carnival, originally published in 1945 (“The Day The Dam Broke” appears in the the book, along with the drawing, Two Thousand People were in Full Flight).
And so, here’s the correct pairing.
Also:
Here’s an interesting/informative appreciation of Louis Slobodkin, who illustrated James Thurber’s Many Moons. From Peter Himmelman’s Morning Musings, July 13, 2026, “The Beauty Of Louis Slobodkin”
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James Thurber’s A-Z Entry
James Thurber Born, Columbus, Ohio, December 8, 1894. Died 1961, New York City. New Yorker work: 1927 -1961, with several pieces run posthumously. According to the New Yorker’s legendary editor, William Shawn, “In the early days, a small company of writers, artists, and editors — E.B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and Katharine White among them — did more to make the magazine what it is than can be measured.”
Key cartoon collection: The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (Harper & Bros., 1932). Key anthology (writings & drawings): The Thurber Carnival (Harper & Row, 1945). There have been a number of Thurber biographies. Burton Bernstein’s Thurber (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life and Times (Henry Holt & Co., 1995) are essential. Website
"Zen portraitist"! Love it.
I don’t know of a finer zen portraitist, both in prose and in images, than Thurber. To this day, so many of the stories I encountered as a child and teen remain as vivid as anything. And revisiting the stories gives just as much pleasure. For instance, the college classes, the microscope and the idiot football player… Heaven.