[The] wife who wants to bring out a volume of her deceased husband's correspondence has not one, but two, reputations to protect, if not, indeed, enhance. But in the case of James Thurber, this double-indemnity embraces a particular threat to candour.

Thurber was a man who spent much of his grafting life in the pockmarked redoubts of the marital front-line, sending back his withering dispatches from the Million Years War, the Ernie Pyle of the sexual barrage and the nuptial raid. Yet there is not one word among the 80,000 gummed together [in Selected Letters of James Thurber] to suggest that he enjoyed anything but snug serenity beneath the monogamous conterpane. The man that Thurber must have been, if we base our reasonable assumptions upon the writer that he unquestionably was, is simply not here. Did he never write privately, to anyone, about lust or love or marriage or...