agosto 24, 2003
The Last Flowerr
a Parable by James Thurber
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The following is a short story in pictures by the American humorist James Thurber (1894-1961). When you read this piece, "What rib-tickling humor!" you are apt to say; "what jolly fun!" Mr. Thurber wrote this story in the terrible year 1939.
I offer this happy little divertissiment to you on the eve of yet another bombing foray against the Fiend of Baghdad, or rather, against his subjects; alas, you may be certain, as certain as sorrow and sin, that not a hair upon the head of our ex-CIA-employee Saddam Hussein will be mussed, not a one!
I scanned this from a old, broken paperback copy of Alarms and Diversions, which was printed by Harper & Row in 1964. Alarms and Diversions was originally published by Harper & Brothers in 1957. According to Amazon Books, this book is out of print and "hard to find". The copyright page of my edition says:
The Last Flower: Copyright 1939 by James Thurber
Unless I am mistaken, that would indicate that this story presently is out of copyright.
Update (10/23/99): Since I wrote this page in February 1998, I have learned that copyrights go for 75 years now, and probably (thanks to the corporate grip on Congress) will be extended forever. After seven or eight centuries of openness and progress, the Cold War killed science dead (it's still twitching a bit, but dead it is) and now Mickey Mouse is murdering literature too. So much for civilization. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted, I guess.
Thus, most likely The Last Flower is still copyrighted. When I first posted this page, The Last Flower was apparently out of print everywhere. But since then Wooster Book Co. has reprinted it in a handsome hardcover edition (ISBN: 1888683457) so you can now buy a printed copy in a bookstore. This book would make a fine Christmas present, to accompany that copy of Quake III or that Tom Clancy novel you might be buying for some young person - this book, together with Eugene Sledge's superb, nightmarish memoir, With the Old Breed on Peleliu and Okinawa (Oxford University Press, ISBN: 0195067142), is precisely what every Tom Clancy fan needs to read.
NOTE: This page may be much faster and easier to read if you let it load completely when you first load it.
Copy/Paste:http://www.concentric.net/~Wkiernan/text/Thurber/Thurber.html
Publicado por dolphin.s em agosto 24, 2003 03:42 PM