[This brief review faults the editors of this volume of letters for their selection criteria, calling the compilation disappointing.]

Thurber was an inveterate letter writer from college days until his death in 1961. When his appalling eyesight became blindness in 1947, he simply resorted to dictation; even afterwards, friends still received occasional notes in his big scrawl. That the letters provide a valuable biographical source was amply recognised by Burton Bernstein, whose Thurber (1975) frequently resembles a collection of letters interspersed with commentary. This being so, devotees of—Twain perhaps excepted—America's greatest humorist will approach this selection with much anticipation, especially as they have waited 15 years since their last fix: the posthumous Thurber and Company. They are liable to be disappointed.

The editors cannot be blamed for the familiarity of these letters, nearly all of which were included, along with many others in Thurber, they can be blamed for their eccentric selection methods. The earliest letter dates from August 1935, by which time Thurber was 40, had published three books (a fourth appeared later that year), and had already left the New Yorker. All very curious until one recalls that Thurber married Helen, his second wife, in July, 1935. So it seems that, for some reason, Mrs Thurber has used her editorial position to eliminate letters predating the marriage.

The selection remains puzzling even if this peculiar arrangement is overlooked. The letters to Harold Ross are drawn exclusively from 1947–49, and there are only five of them: a derisory morsel from a relationship that spanned four decades, from 1927, when Thurber joined the New Yorker, until Ross's death in 1951; the two sets of letters to E. B. White are separated by an unexplained 'lost decade': one set is from 1936–39, the other from 1950–61; there are no letters to Elliott Nugent, Thurber's collaborator on The Male Animal and a friend since their Ohio State days; the editors have deliberately chosen brief letters, despite Thurber's preferences for long rambling missives. Above all, the selection is just too slender—a fragment of a voluminous archive—with little sense of connection or continuity between individual letters. Each letter wastefully begins on a new page, so the book contains many white blanks.

The letters that are included are a mixed lot: inconsequential chatter to friends; numerous bulletins on Thurber's eye condition (one section comprises letters to his ophthalmologist); business letters to editors about works-in-progress (a section deals with the composition of his memoir, The Years with Ross); some nice anecdotes and reminiscences. Tactfully, the editors have omitted the 'raving' letters Thurber tended to write during his final years when his mental health—always troubled—was exceptionally fragile.

Selected Letters of James Thurber is, then, an incomplete and unbalanced compilation. Thurberphiles might better look to Bernstein's book, which features a larger and wider selection of letters and enables them to be seen in perspective and in context.