Thurber Tonight: Fables for Our Time, "The Little Girl and the Wolf"

We began our holiday-season Thurber odyssey last night with a first helping of "The Pet Department." Tonight we have what I think of as the archetype of the Fables for Our Time, published in book form in 1940 (including a section of "Famous Poems Illustrated"). A collection of Further Fables for Our Time was published in 1956.

Wikipedia observes that Thurber's fables "usually conformed to the fable genre to the extent that they were short, featured anthropomorphic animals as main characters, and ended with a moral as a tagline," and next up we've got a typical specimen on a familiar theme, "The Hen and the Heavens." (We've already made the acquaintance of "The Very Proper Gander" in a post that suggested "the teabaggers would know how to deal with him.") I see that Wikipeda proposes as the "most famous" of Thurber's fables one with an all-human cast, "The Unicorn in the Garden." We already had that on our schedule. -- Ken

The Little Girl and the Wolf

ONE AFTERNOON a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. "Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?" asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.

When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother's house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for 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.

Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.


SUNDAY NIGHT: Thurber's "My Fifty Years with James Thurber"

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