He won a Caldecott Honor in 1950 for illustrating Ruth Krauss s The Happy Day, and in 1957 he was awarded the Caldecott Medal for his pictures in A Tree Is Nice by Janice May Udry. He won a Tony Award for his popular Broadway play, A Thurber Carnival.Marc Simont (1915-2013) illustrated nearly a hundred books. Though hampered by failing eyesight, Thurber wrote nearly forty books, including collections of essays, short stories, fables, and children s stories. He began writing for The New Yorker in 1927 after his friend E. James Thurber (1894 1961), one of the outstanding American humorists and cartoonists of the twentieth century, was born in Columbus, Ohio, and launched his professional writing career as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch in 1920. Mine is being wicked ), while wondering at the enigmatic Golux, the mysterious stranger whose unpredictable interventions speed the story to its necessarily happy end. Readers young and old will take pleasure in this tale of love forestalled but ultimately fulfilled, admiring its upstanding hero ( He yearned to find in a far land the princess of his dreams, singing as he went, and possibly slaying a dragon here and there ) and unapologetic villain ( We all have flaws, the Duke said.

So begins James Thurber's sublimely revamped fairy tale, The 13 Clocks, in which a wicked Duke who imagines he has killed time, and the Duke's beautiful niece, for whom time seems to have run out, both meet their match, courtesy of an enterprising and very handsome prince in disguise. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made it difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. His hands were as cold as his smile, and almost as cold as his heart. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn t go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda.

The thirteen clocks by james thurber