James Thurber

Thurber wrote his version of little red riding hood in the WWII era, when the world was experiencing a time of great social upheaval. This included a loss of innocence, children witnessed many atrocities , so the idea of the overly innocent and naive protagonist didn't work anymore. Thurber keeps the fairytale atmosphere by having the wolf know where little red riding hood is, and where she is going without having to ask. The wolf's character doesn't evolve, but sticks to its original plan to disguise itself as the grandmother.  The major change Thurber makes to the plot is that little red riding hood recognizes that the wolf is in fact not her grandmother. This part of the story has always bothered be because, even after factoring in that these stories  occurred before the mass testing and distribution of eye glasses, the difference between a grandmother and a wolf is so huge that anyone, no matter how young or stupid should recognize that something is wrong. I like that Thurber adds that little red riding hood show that it was the wolf from over 25 ft away, emphasizing how obvious the impostor's feeble costume was. I love that little red riding hood pulls out an automatic from her basket and shoots the wolf dead. The abruptness of the action is rather shocking, but the substitution of the gun for the scissors or ax is just a reflection of the time. The moral posed at the end is almost a response to the moral at the end of Perrault's version. Perrault warns the young and beautiful women against all kinds of wolves, and Thurber informs the reader that little girls (and women) have changed, and are not so easy to trick as they once were. This moral may reflect the changing roles of women in society after the war. Women were now in the workplace, many had actually fought in the war, and they had all suffered immense hardship. In Thurber's version, the innocent have learned to defend themselves and stand up to defeat evil.