Bily teaches writing and literature at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan, and writes for various educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses isolation and invisibility in "The Catbird Seat."

When James Thurber published "The Catbird Seat" in the New Yorker, he was already famous. He had published dozens of stories in the magazine, and ten books of humorous writings and cartoons. Each new book was heralded with reviews in all the major publications in the United States and in Europe.

Yet individual short stories, while they were welcomed by regular readers of the New Yorker, were scarcely noticed by critics; "The Catbird Seat" was no exception. Not until it was included in the best-selling collection The Thurber Carnival did it earn its place among the most popular and most widely anthologized American short stories of the twentieth century.

The "The Catbird Seat" was recognized as a...