The name of James Thurber is immediately recognized by the majority of Americans as the author of hundreds of humorous essays and the artist of innumerable cartoons featured in the New Yorker during the Depression and war years. Few people know, however, that Thurber's experiments with fantasy went far beyond the fictive daydreams of Walter Mitty. Like Wilde and Tolstoy before him, Thurber found some of what he had to say required a more fantastic vehicle for its expression than contemporary adult prose forms provided. Between 1939 and 1957, Thurber wrote one self-illustrated parable, two collections of fables, and five fairy tales. But whether to classify these works as literature for children containing sophisticated literary devices and complex observations on human behavior or as adult tales expressed in the characteristic forms of children's works is a puzzle which critics have not yet solved.

James Grover Thurber spent the first twenty-four...