Thurber

--> Outline who you think the audience is and what the fairy tale's retelling says about the culture and time in which it is written:

James Thurber was best known for his contribution to "The New Yorker" magazine, whose audience is very much adult. It is clear that his version of Little Red Riding Hood "The Little Girl and the Wolf" was intended for adults as well.

According to Wikipedia, Thurber's fables were often satirical and that the "moral" was really more of a punchline. In his fairy tale "The Little Girl and the Wolf" Thurber very briefly sets up the Grimm/Perrault version of Little Red Riding Hood, with the little girl carrying a basket of food to her grandmother and encountering the wolf in the woods. However, Thurber chooses the point when the little girl sees the wolf at grandma's house to completely take off in a different direction. Thurber comments that "the wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge." This is where it first becomes obvious that Thurber intended this fairy tale to be enjoyed by adults because children would most definitely not understand this comparison.
Thurber finishes off the story with the little girl shooting the wolf with an automatic - something also not intended for children. At the end, the moral is indeed a punchline that would be enjoyed by the adults reading it.

This fairy tale was written in 1940, right in the middle of World War II. It was a time when people were in need of funny, lighthearted stories like "The Little Girl and the Wolf" in order to take their minds off of the war that was going on. Thurber's comedic tone definitely represents this desire for people at the time to have something that could take their minds off of hard times.