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    A Study Guide for James Thurber's "The Night the Ghost Got In"
    A Study Guide for James Thurber's "The Night the Ghost Got In"
    A Study Guide for James Thurber's "The Night the Ghost Got In"
    Ebook36 pages26 minutes

    A Study Guide for James Thurber's "The Night the Ghost Got In"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for James Thurber's "The Night the Ghost Got In," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535838665
    A Study Guide for James Thurber's "The Night the Ghost Got In"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for James Thurber's "The Night the Ghost Got In" - Gale

      1

      The Night the Ghost Got In

      James Thurber

      1933

      Introduction

      The Night the Ghost Got In is a prime example of the storytelling technique of James Thurber, who is widely considered one of the greatest humor writers that America ever produced. It was published in Thurber's 1933 book My Life and Hard Times, a fictionalized account of his childhood in Columbus, Ohio. Like most of Thurber's best works from that collection, the story combines events that are plausible with comic exaggeration and then adds responses that range from exaggeration to deadpan. The characters' inappropriate understanding of their world serves the dual purposes of amusing readers while revealing to them the uneven balances of the human mind.

      The story centers on a common situation: the narrator (a first-person speaker, standing in for Thurber as a young man) hears a strange sound downstairs in the middle of the night. He assumes that it is a ghost, but his mother calls the police, who are thoroughly befuddled by the odd characters of the Thurber household and their way of life. By the time it is over, one of the policemen has been shot in the shoulder by the household's senile grandfather, and a local news reporter, told that a ghost is the cause of all the commotion, is left speechless. Since it is a light comedy, there are no serious repercussions in this story, and in the end life goes on in the household just as it had before.

      My Life and Hard Times is still in print in paperback, more than seventy years after its first publication. This story is also included in the Library of America volume James Thurber: Writings and Drawings, edited by Garrison Keillor.

      Author Biography

      James Thurber was born on December 8, 1894, in Columbus, Ohio, the town that, throughout his travels and writing, he always referred back to and spoke fondly of as his home. Thurber's father was a clerk and minor politician and was often unemployed, a situation that caused the family to have many relatives living in the house at one time to help share the expenses. It was from his mother that Thurber received

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