About the Author

James Thurber (1894–1961) was one of the preeminent American humorists and cartoonists of the twentieth century. Most famous for his widely anthologized short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” he was a contributor to The New Yorker for more than thirty years and wrote nearly forty books—collections of essays, short stories, fables, and children’s stories, including The 13 Clocks and the Caldecott Medal winner Many Moons.
 
Marc Simont (illustrations; 1915–2013) illustrated nearly a hundred books, among them James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks and a 1990 edition of Thurber’s Many Moons. He worked with such authors as Marjorie Weinman Sharmat (on the Nate the Great series) and Margaret Wise Brown and won both a Caldecott Honor and a Caldecott Medal for his illustrations of children’s books.

Ransom Riggs (introduction) is the author of the multimillion-copy #1 New York Times bestseller Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children—now a major motion picture by Tim Burton—as well as its bestselling sequels Hollow City and Library of Souls and the companion volume Tales of the Peculiar. He grew up in Florida and now lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

“A perfect book for children and one every thinking adult should read. It’s a timeless story that can be read as a commentary on world affairs a half century ago, but that feels absolutely (and sadly) relevant today. . . . It accomplishes feat after feat of linguistic acrobatics: Not quite poetry, not quite prose, O is ear candy.” —Ransom Riggs, from the Introduction

“No one else could think up a fairy story, tale, legend, exercise, or what have you, based upon ‘O’ alone. Certainly no one else could bring it off if he had. Mr. Thurber, however, can, did, and does. No more worthy ‘O’ words could go before The Wonderful O than another O Wonderful.” —The New York Times
 
“A prodigious performance. As a medium in the great séance of letters [Thurber] is incomparable; he has only to utter an incantatory moan, and words levitate, phrases rap out unexpected messages, and whole sentences turn into ectoplasm.” —The New Yorker
 
“A tale for children, and a reminder for adults, of the joys of love, liberty, language, and, not least, humor. It has pirates and treasure and magic and a message that especially in complacent times must not be forgotten. . . . The Wonderful O is a book worth finding, wherever you can, and reading, as one of its characters concludes, ‘lest we forget.’” —The Wall Street Journal

“The loveliest and liveliest of parables. The end is a real surprise.” —Harper’s Magazine

“Hilarious . . . Thurber uses humor to explore what becomes of a society when something we use to communicate—to understand and to be understood—is taken away.” —The Weekly Standard

“Full of word lists and wordplay, with charming illustrations by Marc Simont, it is a verbally ambitious little classic for logophiles. Or, as the pirate would have it, lgphiles.” —The Sunday Times (London)
 
“Excellent Thurber. Besides being a highly original fairy tale and a rollicking linguistic gambol, The Wonderful O is a still further fable for our time—perhaps the best and most serious that Thurber has written.” —New York Herald Tribune Book Review
 
“Perhaps the worthiest contemporary fabulist in English. [Thurber’s] effects are almost musical. He gets us to laugh and gulp down another lesson in the value of human liberty at one and the same time.” —San Francisco Examiner
 
“Pure and unadulterated Thurber, and that means Thurber at his zaniest. Not since Lewis Carroll has such foolishness masked such wisdom; and besides, it’s a gale of fun from start to finish.” —St. Louis Globe-Democrat
 
“While ostensibly for children who will love its wit, its rhythms, and its free-flowing imagination, it will speak irresistibly to older minds and funnybones and, one might add, hearts.” —Boston Herald