Throughout his long career, and ever since, James Thurber has been considered one of America's great humor writers, and My Life and Hard Times, the book that "The Night the Ghost Got In" comes from, is widely considered to be his best work. In 1933, the year that the book was published, Robert M. Coates wrote in the New Republic that it constituted "the pleasantest mixture of fantasy and understanding, one of the funniest books of recent times." More than half a century later, Robert Emmet Long writing in his book James Thurber still referred to that particular volume of Thurber's work as "one of the most striking and original books published in America in the 1930s."

The public never seemed to lose its appreciation for Thurber's comic pieces and his drawings, which came less and less frequently as his eyesight failed. What was unusual, however, was...