France does not figure prominently as a subject in James Thurber's works. Yet his three longest European sojourns--from November 1918 to March 1920, from May 1925 to May 1926, and from May 1937 to August 1938--proved influential to his development as a writer. His first Parisian stay dislodged some of his early provincial views; his second unleashed the comic voice that attained full maturity during the New Yorker years. All three visits to the Continent provided Thurber with norms against which to measure the American attitudes and manners examined in his best essays, stories, and drawings.

James Grover Thurber was the second of three sons born to Mary Fisher Thurber and Charles L. Thurber in Columbus, Ohio. Although he was blinded in the left eye by a childhood accident, Thurber was an excellent, but introverted, public school student. He dropped out of Ohio State University after the 1913-1914 school year, but in the...