The White Deer Summary
The White Deer concerns faith in love.
Love depends upon the will of lovers to believe in each other despite all obstacles. Though the story is playful, fastpaced, funny, at times satirical and at times absurd, the theme is serious, as are the obstacles thrown up before the lovers. Secrets of the past and fears of the future, prejudices and the lack of imagination, accident and sorcery—all threaten love's survival.
Loosely adhering to fairy tale conventions, Thurber invites the reader into an imaginary world where an enchanted white deer, cornered in a magic forest, is suddenly transformed into a beautiful princess without a name. She sets King Clode's three sons—Thag, Gallow, and Jorn—tasks to perform to decide whom she will marry. The tasks she sets for Thag and Gallow are perilous but she chooses an easy task for Jorn, her favorite. In...
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Study Pack
The The White Deer Study Pack contains:
The White Deer Short Guide
James Thurber Biographies (7)
385 words, approx. 2 pages
James Grove Thurber (1894-1961) was an American writer and artist. One of the most popular humorists of his time, Thurber celebrated in stories and in cartoons the comic frustrations of eccentric and ...
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15,031 words, approx. 51 pages
Biography EssayIn a general survey of American humor, James Thurber comes after the traditional horsesense humorists and before the black humorists of the postatomic era. His most famous and most endu...
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2,076 words, approx. 7 pages
France does not figure prominently as a subject in James Thurber's works. Yet his three longest European sojourns--from November 1918 to March 1920, from May 1925 to May 1926, and from May 1937 to Aug...
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14,253 words, approx. 48 pages
In a general survey of American humor, James Thurber comes after the traditional horse-sense humorists and before the black humorists of the postatomic era. His most famous and most enduring work deve...
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2,834 words, approx. 10 pages
The name of James Thurber is immediately recognized by the majority of Americans as the author of hundreds of humorous essays and the artist of innumerable cartoons featured in the New Yorker during t...
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7,170 words, approx. 24 pages
Next to Mark Twain, James Thurber is the most critically acclaimed humorist in American literary history. Like Twain he first established his reputation as a journalist. By the time he died, he was re...
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6,039 words, approx. 21 pages
Called "one of the world's greatest humorists" by Alistair Cooke in the Atlantic, James Thurber was one of the mainstays of the New Yorker magazine, where his short stories, essays, and numerous carto...
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