1) It's instructive to note how one period runs into another, so that an almost Victorian courtliness and poeticism can alternate with a 1920s impulse to step on the gas. (Since the postman still knocks several times a day, how's about a little action tonight? Or should we wait a couple of years?)

2) Thurber's unrequited lifelong squeeze, Ann Honeycutt, deserves a fuller identification than she gets in this volume. She was a smart and funny character in her own right who actually deserves her own chapter in New Yorker history. His unwavering love for her speaks very well for him indeed. It means that he not only aimed high but also had no trouble loving women as equals, to put it mildly. (When I asked Miss Honeycutt to describe him, she confirmed what probably so many of us had suspected just from our reading: that he'd been a delightful kid from Ohio who became a great writer, and knew it. Which was a pity.)