This image is the cover for the book Without a Stitch in Time

Without a Stitch in Time

“The range of his performance is hard to equal. . . . De Vries produces something that is more than brilliant entertainment.” —New York Times

Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia—the school of John Updike and Cheever—this work from the great American humorist Peter De Vries looks with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. Without a Stitch in Time, a selection of forty-six articles and stories written for the New Yorker between 1943 and 1973, offers pun-filled autobiographical vignettes that reveal the source of De Vries’s nervous wit: the cognitive dissonance between his Calvinist upbringing in 1920s Chicago and the all-too-perfect postwar world. Noted as much for his verbal fluidity and wordplay as for his ability to see humor through pain, De Vries will delight both new readers and old in this uproarious modern masterpiece.

“The beauty of a pun is in the eye of the beholder. . . . For between the punch lines, De Vries shows himself as a lapsed Calvinist who sees the world as a reproach to that incurable hypocrite, man. Irony is De Vries’s weapon, and this collection of fugitive pieces extends his gallery of not always humane inconsistencies.” —Time

“Quick with quips so droll and witty, so penetrating and precise that you almost don’t feel them piercing your pretensions.” -- Sacramento Bee

“The funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic.” —Kingsley Amis

“A peerless American maestro of wit.” —The Millions

Peter De Vries

Peter De Vries (1910–1993) was born in Chicago to Dutch immigrant parents. His father wanted him to join the clergy, but after attending Calvin College and Northwestern University, De Vries found work as a vending-machine operator, a toffee-apple salesman, a radio actor, and an editor at Poetry magazine. His friend and mentor James Thurber brought him to the attention of the New Yorker, and in 1944 De Vries moved to New York to become a regular staff contributor to the magazine, where he worked for the next forty years.
A prolific author of novels, short stories, parodies, poetry, and essays, he published twenty-seven books during his lifetime and was heralded by Kingsley Amis as the “funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic.” De Vries was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983, taking his place alongside Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and S. J. Perelman as one of the nation’s greatest wits. 

The University of Chicago Press