Introduction

“Comedy is his chosen field,” Malcolm Cowley wrote of James Thurber, but while Thurber’s range of effects is deliberately limited, within that range nobody writes better than he does, that is, more clearly and flexibly, with a deeper feeling for the genius of language and the value of words. Cowley, in his essay “Lions and Lemmings, Toads and Tigers” inThurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, continued, “He prefers the familiar words that would be used in conversation without a self-conscious pause. His art consists in arranging them so that they give the impression of standing cleanly and separately on the page, each in its place like stones in a well-built wall.”

Thurber, who may well stand unchallenged as America’s twentieth-century Mark Twain—in 1958 he became the first American since Twain to be invited to join the editors ofPunch during their weekly luncheon—established himself as a writer and cartoonist after joining theNew Yorker staff in 1927. Charles S. Holmes wrote, inThe Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber, his “creative talent flowered in the years after he joined the magazine.”Is Sex Necessary? (1929),The Owl in the Attic (1931),The Seal in the Bedroom (1932),My Life and Hard Times (1933), andThe Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) established him as a writer and cartoonist of rare originality. Here were the subjects, characters, and themes which identified his work up to the period of his blindness: the domestic scene and the trivia which somehow explode into major conflicts; the timid day-dreamy men and the aggressive practical women; the view of marriage as a state of undeclared war; the celebration of the natural, the individual, the eccentric as against conventions, formulas, and systems of all kinds; and above all, the constant and surprising interplay of reality and fantasy.”

In the Prospectus for the first i