The fact that Thurber wrote "An American Romance" at one short sitting was an anomaly. Normally, he spent enormous amounts of time perfecting his writing; many works remained unfinished for years. To some extent the writer's commitment of time to his work helps to explain his success. Thurber's style is his trademark.

It is above all readable. Perhaps because his pieces are short they hold the reader's attention. (In spite of his several attempts to write a novel — one of which resulted in his spending "a thousand hours" on a 20, 000-word book that went through twenty to thirty rewrites over a period of two years yet was never published — he did not complete a novel because he could not sustain a reader's interest over such a length.) Thurber was meticulous and precise in word choice, and as a result his prose flows. It is relaxed and...