On June 13, 2014, Alexandra Alter called James Thurber‘s The 13 Clocks (Simon & Schuster, 1950) “required reading for human beings.”
Why is that? What would make someone suggest that this book, now written 65 years ago, is so important?
The book is only 124 pages long, and contained within it are illustrations by Marc Simont.
As one customer reviewer noted on Amazon.com, the book is a tale written for teenagers and their parents. Here is the description from the same site:
“The wicked, one-eyed duke of Coffin Castle lives in his cold fortress along with his beautiful, warm niece Saralinda. There are thirteen clocks in the castle that stopped marking time at the same moment. The duke hates time; indeed, he believes he has killed it. The only things he loves are his jewels and, apparently, his niece. There have been many suitors for Saralinda, but all failed to pass the terrible tests the duke set for them. A prince, Zorn of Zorna, disguised as a minstrel, comes to seek Saralinda’s hand.”
Last summer, author Neil Gaiman led a multi-week discussion about this book for the Wall Street Journal Book Club. One reader asked him about some nuances he discovered when he read the book to his own children. This is his reply: “One thing you really only discover when you read this book aloud is the amount of weird and wonderful internal rhymes. It is a book that in many ways is meant to be read aloud, which is not a way people read these days….I highly recommend that if you have anybody that will sit still long enough, or possibly just a patient dog or hamster, read this book aloud to them. If you read this book aloud, you will find things in it that you did not know were there” (WSJ, June 13, 2014, p. D6).
James Thurber was an American writer and artist. One of the most popular humorists (writers of clever humor) of his time, Thurber celebrated in stories and in cartoons the comic frustrations of eccentric yet ordinary people. He was born on December 8, 1894, in Columbus, Ohio, to Charles Leander and Mary Agnes Thurber. The family soon moved to Virginia where Charles was employed as a secretary to a congressman. While playing with his older brother, Thurber was permanently blinded in his left eye after being shot with an arrow. Problems with his eyesight would plague Thurber for much of his life. After Charles’s employer lost a reelection campaign, the Thurbers were forced to move back to Ohio. Thurber attended the local public schools and graduated high school with honors in 1913. He went on to attend Ohio State University—though he never took a degree—and worked for some years afterwards in Ohio as a journalist. Thurber moved to New York City in 1926 and a year later he met writer E. B. White (1899–1985) and was taken onto the staff of the New Yorker magazine. In collaboration with White he produced his first book, Is Sex Necessary? (1929). By 1931 his first cartoons began appearing in the New Yorker. These primitive yet highly stylized characterizations included seals, sea lions, strange tigers, harried men, determined women, and, most of all, dogs. Thurber’s dogs became something like a national comic institution, and they dotted the pages of a whole series of books. He died in New York City on November 2, 1961 from pneumonia after suffering a stroke. Read more: 