The Wonderful O.

Front Cover
Simon and Schuster, 1957 - Fiction - 72 pages
The man with the map & the man with the ship sailed for the island rich with sapphires, emeralds & rubies. Their vessel was called AEIU, which has every vowel but O. The owner hated O because his mother had become wedged in a porthole & they couldn't pull her in, so they had to push her out. The Island, Ooroo, was inhabited by gentle people who did not resist when the pirates unable to find any jewels decided to get rid of all words with an O in them. Cnfusin reigned, & chas. A man named Otto Ott, when asked his name, could only stutter. Ophelia Oliver was ashamed. Babies often made as much sense as their fathers. The islanders decided there were words with an O that must not be lost. Three of them were "Hope" & "Love" & "Valor." The fourth & most important is really the whole point of "The Wonderful O"

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Contents

Section 1
20
Section 2
24
Section 3
34
Copyright

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About the author (1957)

Born in Columbus, Ohio, Thurber was blinded in one eye in a childhood accident. He attended Ohio State University but left without earning a degree. In 1925 he moved to New York City, where he joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1927 at the urging of his friend E. B. White. For the rest of his lifetime, Thurber contributed to the magazine his highly individual pieces and those strange, wry, and disturbing pen-and-ink drawings of "huge, resigned dogs, the determined and sometimes frightening women, the globular men who try so hard to think so unsuccessfully." The period from 1925, when the New Yorker was founded, until the death of its creator-editor, Harold Ross, in 1951, was described by Thurber in delicious and absorbing detail in The Years with Ross (1959). Of his two great talents, Thurber preferred to think of himself primarily as a writer, illustrating his own books. He published "fables" in the style of Aesop (see Vol. 2) and La Fontaine (see Vol. 2)---usually with a "barbed tip of contemporary significance"---children's books, several plays (two Broadway hits, one successful musical revue), and endless satires and parodies in short stories or full-length works. "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," included in My World---and Welcome to It (1942), is probably his best-known story and continues to be frequently anthologized. T. S. Eliot described Thurber's work as "a form of humor which is also a way of saying something serious."

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