"The Princess and the Tin Box" is a short story by

James Thurber James Grover Thurber (December 8, 1894 – November 2, 1961) was an American cartoonist, writer, humorist, journalist and playwright. He was best known for his cartoons and short stories, published mainly in ''The New Yorker'' and collected in ...

in the form of a modern

fable Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular mo ...

.Tiffin, Jessica (2009)
''Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale''
pp. 38–39. Wayne State University Press It was first published in the September 29, 1945 edition of ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'' magazine and republished in 1948 in Thurber's ''The Beast in Me and Other Animals: A New Collection of Pieces and Drawings about Human Beings and Less Alarming Creatures''.Porton, Harriet D. (2013
''Teaching the Standards: How to Blend Common Core State Standards into Secondary Instruction''
pp. 13; 16; 27. R&L Education The story is widely used as a text in schools for teaching both writing skills and reading comprehension.

References

Works by James Thurber Works originally published in The New Yorker 1945 short stories {{1940s-story-stub