People have more fun than anybody

In this centennial volume of previously uncollected work, James Thurber continues to flourish. Here is the pleasure of recognizing this comic genius at work again, with his suspicious, civilized, unsettling wit. Included are eighteen prose pieces and over seventy-five drawings by the only cartoonist who could claim to draw "abstract things like despair, disillusion, despondency, sorrow, lapse of memory, exile . . . sometimes in a shape that might be called Man or Woman." Here are drawings with such contemporary smarts that they still sting, including dozens of reports from the front line in that cold war between the sexes. This is Thurber at his most entertaining, praising things canine in two marvelous tributes, musing over the promises of mail sweepstakes, confessing his aversion to anything mechanical, puzzling over the animal kingdom's curious uprisings, reconsidering the value of Byrd's claiming of the icy lands of Antarctica ("Are we landowners or ice dealers? Are we men or penguins?"), and observing the fate of sex. For good measure, Michael Rosen offers the recipe for Thurber's favorite birthday cake, the Never-Fail Devil's Food.