In the following essay, Long surveys both the best known stories of Thurber and some of the lesser known.

In this essay, Arner discusses the first ten years of Thurber's writing career and his humor's relation to the Depression era.

In the following essay, Kaufman notes that below the surface of Thurber's “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” lies an increasing preoccupation with fantasy life and rejection of reality.

In the following essay, Arnold discusses Thurber's use of animals in his short fiction.

In the following essay, Kaufman disputes the consensus that Walter Mitty is an everyman to be sympathized with. Instead, he proposes that the story is a critique of Mitty's inability to cope with his life.

In the following mixed assessment, Seligman finds that some of Thurber's work retains a peculiar charm but that most of it is overwrought and dated, the product of a talent that never achieved its potential.

In the following essay, Triesch examines the ways in which Thurber changed the traditional form of the fable.

In this essay, Gehring identifies Thurber's work for the New Yorker in the 1920s as one of the first instances of a new twentieth-century literary figure, the comic antihero.

This rapid overview of many of Thurber's most famous works aims to dispute Thurber's critical reputation as the foremost American humorist of his time.

Beyond question the foremost humorist of the twentieth century, James Thurber was a divided man. With minor exceptions he did not explore the century's large social and political problems. War, religion, crime, poverty, civil rights—these were not his subjects. Instead he struck at the immemorial stupidities, cruelties, and perversities of men that lie at the root of our ills. A disillusioned idealist, he satirized mean behavior to sound the clearest note of his discontent. Yet he considered h...

[James Thurber's] work is often said to be in the line of Twain, Henry James, or T. S. Eliot, and, indeed, he shares traits with all three. In view of his literary standing and the evident sophistication of his themes and techniques, it may seem presumptuous to squeeze such a figure into the [tradition of fantasy writers like L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz]. But there he belongs, as the fullest flowering of that tradition. Thurber was content, for many years, to write fictionalized account...

In the following essay, Secor determines how the character of Walter Mitty reflects the image of Joseph Conrad's creation, Lord Jim.

In this essay, Blythe and Sweet analyze the sexual symbolism in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”

Thurber was a marvelous comic writer, but alone among such he was able to sketch the phantasmagoric goo from which his funny ideas came. If Henry James or Dostoevsky had done their own illustrations, the results could hardly have been stranger or more illuminating. Men, Women and Dogs is like a writer's head with the back open; the fact that it's funny back there is as spooky as anything in Jung. Thurber did not make up his jokes in his mouth, like so many clowns, but somewhere between the opt...

That skillful literary man, St. Augustine, has warned that one should never smite an opponent in bad grammar. Applying a loose interpretation, we could translate his wise teaching thus: If a man would carry a discussion through points A, B, C and D, don't let him think he has got anywhere, in the way of cogency, simply by lining up a good argument. For should he have a lisp, or should someone in his audience periodically sneeze in a notable way, or should there be an irrelevant voice echoing from the...

[The] wife who wants to bring out a volume of her deceased husband's correspondence has not one, but two, reputations to protect, if not, indeed, enhance. But in the case of James Thurber, this double-indemnity embraces a particular threat to candour. Thurber was a man who spent much of his grafting life in the pockmarked redoubts of the marital front-line, sending back his withering dispatches from the Million Years War, the Ernie Pyle of the sexual barrage and the nuptial raid. Yet there is not one...

In this essay, Cheatham explores the function of sin, death, and judgment in the fantasies of Thurber's character Walter Mitty.

In the following essay, May suggests that Thurber's short story “You Could Look It Up” is an Americanized version of the story of Christ.

This essay views Thurber's baseball short story "You Could Look It Up" as an "ironic, modernized retelling" of a biblical tale.

In the following review the critic deems that Thurber's posthumously published essays and sketches in Credos and Curios are a representative summary of Thurber's career.

In this review, Joyce, a writer of children's books, welcomes the republication of three of Thurber's books for young people.

This brief review finds most of the works included in Collecting Himself not worth a new anthology but nonetheless appreciates a few of Thurber's more insightful essays.

The following review finds the previously uncollected works in People Have More Fun Than Anybody equal to any of Thurber's more celebrated and familiar writing and cartoons.

In this brief essay, Underwood offers a previously overloooked explanation for the events of Thurber's classic story.

This review of Selected Letters of James Thurber warmly appreciates the substance of the volume but comments unfavorably on the selection criteria for which letters are included.

The following positive review considers Thurber's Credos and Curios in relation to the author's whole body of work.

In contrast to unenthusiastic responses to Thurber's Collecting Himself, this review finds the collection a "luminous delight."

This brief review faults the editors of this volume of letters for their selection criteria, calling the compilation disappointing.

James Thurber was often an irascible and difficult man, but there is little of that side of his personality in these Selected Letters. Here we find him for the most part sunny side up—and what a pleasure that is. This is a slender volume, evidently intended to be a representative rather than an inclusive selection of his correspondence, but it contains enough first-rate Thurber to be ranked among his better books. Indeed, if justice is at work in the world these days, the publication of these letters...

[James Thurber] was one of the funniest men alive, if you at all tuned in to his doggerel cartoons, with their barking seals and daffily aggressive women swooping on gloomily defenceless males, and his fables, like 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' and 'The Night the Bed Fell', which were angry parables of despair and raging frustration. Thurber was often like one of his own flopping, loping, terrified animals. His humour, occasionally a little too arch and fey, was redeemed by a...

In a tribute to Mary Thurber written after her death in 1955 and reprinted in Alarms and Diversions Thurber testified to the life-long occupation of his mind by a sense of confusion apparently brought on by his formidable mother's addiction to practical jokes involving elaborate disguises and sudden shifts of identity. Images of this confusion—Mitty's autism, the 'chronic word garblings' of lady conversationalists in the party pieces, the famous drawings of the seal in the...

Encounters—with unfriendly food, or machinery, or objects that took on a life of their own—were essential to [James Thurber's] vision of human existence as an obstacle race. The Thurber man's feeling of helplessness when faced with collapsing cots, stalled cars, computers gone beserk, falling ceilings, malign plumbing, situations beyond control, marriages, ghosts in the attic and global war had to seem hilarious—since the author's own perception of chaos was sometim...

Afflicted by bad eyesight and eventual blindness, James Thurber had good reason to bemoan the advancing darkness and the racing years, as, in ["Selected Letters of James Thurber"], he does. The miracle is that under such a burden he wrote 27 books (starting at the age of 35) that cheered millions of people with their humor and perpetual surprise. His drawings were uniquely antic; his prose was a marvel of sonority and warmth. In these public offerings the rest of us could glimpse some of the f...

In the following brief review, the critic laments that Thurber's Credos and Curios is likely his last work.

The temptation to tangle with an analysis of the late James Thurber's gay and anguished humour is generally irresistible to reviewers confronted with such excerpts from the work of this inconsistently gifted man as may, from time to time, be offered upon a stage. It probably will, however, be resisted by me. This is partly because analysis entails rationality, and I doubt whether that is quite the thing to bring to any question involving humorous taste; partly because I can see the folly of attemptin...