Though he died some forty years ago, James Thurber remains a vastly popular author, whose irreverent, insightful, and consistently witty books--for both adults and children, and typically illustrated with his droll cartoons--remain largely in print. Simon & Schuster had a strong and lasting relationship with Thurber, so it is appropriate that we be the publisher of this new collection of his letters. (An earlier collection, published in 1981 by Little, Brown, and edited by Thurber's widow, is long out of print.) For the first time, James Thurber's daughter will allow the publication of many of the extremely personal letters he wrote to both her and her late mother, and, in addition, Harrison Kinney who will edit this collection, has located many others that have never before been published. The books that Thurber wrote--with titles such as My World and Welcome to It, The Beast in Me and Other Animals, My Life and Hard Times, The Middle Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and Is Sex Necessary?--were not only works of great humor, but also offered glimpses into the author's own life. As with most humorists, however, Thurber employed exaggeration and good-natured self-deprecation, and so what glimpses of the writer's life we get are no more than distorted peeks into his mind and psyche. Rather, it is in his letters that Thurber offered some candid glimpses into who he really was, and why the prisms through which he viewed the world were so delightfully distorting. As Harrison Kinney, the editor for this collection, notes in his description of this volume, ""Thurber's letters trace, in wondrous fashion, his progress from immature, love-sick college boy to youthful code clerk with the State Dept. in Paris; his days reporting for The Columbus Dispatch; his infatuations with a co-ed at Ohio State University and later, a star of stage and screen, a grade school classmate he had worshipped from boyhood; his introduction to playwriting through...