Called "one of the world's greatest humorists" by Alistair Cooke in the Atlantic, James Thurber was one of the mainstays of the New Yorker magazine, where his short stories, essays, and numerous cartoons were published for over thirty years. "Comedy is his chosen field," wrote Malcolm Cowley in Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, "and his range of effects is deliberately limited, but within that range there is nobody who writes better than Thurber, that is, more clearly and flexibly, with a deeper feeling for the genius of the language and the value of words."

"I'm always astounded when my humor is described as gentle," Thurber is quoted as saying in Burton Bernstein's biography, Thurber. "It's anything but that." An underlying tension, a desperation, is present in Thurber's work. Charles S. Holmes, in his Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, noted "the pessimism and the sense of disaster...