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

When a writer has entertained us so well for so many years as James Thurber did, it is difficult to pick up his latest book and believe it will be the last, as the posthumous Credos and Curios may very well be, unless, please God, there is more uncollected Thurber lying around. The loss is all the more painful when we notice that the most recent pieces here collected show that the incomparable humorist retained every bit of brilliance and verve to the very end.

Most of these pieces, I suppose, might be labeled "casuals," though in the literal sense of the word Thurber never wrote anything casual in his life. His style was a product of intense concentration, and few writers of our time could pack more into a single page or paragraph. Much of his comic effect depended upon the ability to bring his entire point of view—really a weird kind of common sense—to bear upon the apparently trivial points his terrier mind could root out of the human confusion around us.

In his last years he turned more and more frequently to pieces of personal reminiscence, like his wonderful memorial to Harold Ross, where the humor became more affectionate than biting. The present volume includes a number of fine personal portraits and tributes: to Robert Benchley, Scott Fitzgerald, E. B. White, and others. The most moving of these—and, fittingly enough, it is placed at the end of the book—is a salute to his dear departed friend John McNulty, which maintains so wonderfully the tone of hail and farewell that one finds oneself wishing Thurber were around to say the last words about himself.