"James Grover Thurber," writes Harrison Kinney, "is considered the preeminent American humorist of the twentieth century by those who keep score in grand matters of this kind.... My Life and Hard Times raised the bar of comic literary reminiscence to a height that no other practitioner of the genre has come close to clearing." This biography of Thurber is practically a lifelong project for Kinney, who first wrote about the humorist for a Columbia master"s thesis in the late 1940s and contracted to write this book in 1962. It weighs in at well over 1,000 pages, due primarily to the amount of background the biographer provides. The discussion of Thurber"s years at The New Yorker, for example, which takes up much of the final two-thirds of the book, is preceded by a 16-page history of Harold Ross"s stewardship of the magazine before Thurber"s arrival. But any charges of excessiveness are easily brushed aside by the steady parade of hilarious anecdotes, the numerous quotes from Thurber"s own works and correspondence, as well as reproductions of the classic Thurber cartoons, including "All Right, Have It Your Way--You Heard a Seal Bark!" which Robert Benchley called "the funniest cartoon caption the magazine had ever run." This cornucopia of biographic material also provides rich insight into the ways in which Thurber transmuted his personal experiences into lasting art of the highest order. This is a book not to be missed.