When I was growing up in Falls Church, Virginia in the 1950s, James Thurber was part of the atmosphere I breathed. I was a compulsive reader while still in single digits, and I studied the books in every home I visited, seeing The Thurber Carnival, My Life and Hard Times, The Last Flower, Thirteen Clocks, Men, Women, and Dogs, and The Beast in Me. Short stories like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and “The Catbird Seat” were more than legend. Somewhere around the age of 10 I read my way through the entire Subtreasury of American Humor, put together by E. B. and Katherine White, and “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” and “The Greatest Man in the World” struck me as absolute gems, perfect works of art that were, line for line, funnier than anything even Mark Twain had written.
