"The Unicorn in the Garden" is a short story written by James Thurber. One of the most famous of Thurber's humorous modern fables, it first appeared in The New Yorker on October 21, 1939; and was first collected in his book Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated. The fable has since been reprinted in The Thurber Carnival, James Thurber: Writings and Drawings, The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales, and other publications. It is taught in literature and rhetoric courses.
Plot summary
A husband sees a unicorn in the family garden and tells his wife about it. She ridicules him, telling him "the unicorn is a mythical beast" and calls him a "booby". When he persists, she threatens to send him to the "booby hatch". He persists, and she summons the authorities. However, after she tells them what her husband saw and they note her own somewhat loony-looking facial features, they force her into a straitjacket. They then ask the husband if he told his wife he had seen a unicorn. Not wanting to be locked up himself, he prudently tells them that he has not, because "the unicorn is a mythical beast." Thus they take the wife away instead, and "the husband lived happily ever after". The story ends with, "Moral: Don't count your boobies before they're hatched", a play on the popular adage, "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched". Thus, the moral advises not to expect one's hopes to be a certainty.
An animated version of the story was released by United Productions of America in 1953. The cartoon was directed by William Hurtz, and was originally intended to be part of a feature based on Thurber's work, to be called Men, Women and Dogs. In 1994, it was voted #48 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field. The fable was also adapted to the stage as part of the 1960 revue A Thurber Carnival. The original cast for this portion of the stage production was as follows:
Paul Ford - Man
Alice Ghostley - She
John McGiver - Psychiatrist
Peter Turgeon - Narrator
Charles Braswell - Policeman
The fable was animated again as part of the My World and Welcome to It episode "The Night the House Caught Fire", which first aired October 13, 1969. In the episode, William Windom as John Monroe tells the story to his daughter Lydia as his accompanying drawings come to life for the viewer. The episode was written and directed by series creator Melville Shavelson. The animation for the series was by DePatie-Freleng Enterprises. Also in 1969, a musical adaptation of "The Unicorn in the Garden", composed by Russell Smith, was performed by the Denver Lyric Opera in Denver. In a 1985 episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Johnny mentions the story and tells sidekick Ed McMahon the plot. An audio adaptation of the story, read by Peter Ustinov, was released by Caedmon Audio in 1986.
Allusions
The 1950 filmHarvey contains a scene depicting characters at a psychiatrist's office, where Veta is committed to the institution instead of Elwood. Dr. Richard Lenski, leader of the E. colilong-term evolution experiment, made an allusion to the story in a widely disseminated response to Conservapedia founder Andrew Schlafly : "In other words, it's not that we claim to have glimpsed 'a unicorn in the garden' – we have a whole population of them living in my lab!" The of the TV seriesLife on Mars has similarities with the story. The protagonist, Detective Inspector Sam Tyler tells a criminal that he, Tyler, is a time traveller from the future. When the criminal tells Tyler's colleagues of this, in an attempt to discredit him, Tyler denies being the source of the 'delusion' and the criminal is discredited instead. "The Sloths", a song by Red Krayola, has been described as "a peculiar rewrite of a James Thurber short story ". In the short fiction piece "Scrabble with God" by John M. Ford a newly created animal is described as "eating the rosebushes, like Thurber's unicorn".
