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By careful count, there is one good original line in this book: Thurber scribbled his marvelous drawings by the hundreds and, says Bernstein, "he gave them away like smiles." There is a good wisecrack by Hemingway: "Even when Thurber was writing under the name of Alice B. Toklas, we knew he had it in him." And there is a good anecdote not previously told: at one point after Thurber became blind, a New Yorker office boy was detailed to lead him to the apartment of a woman he was meeting on the sly, and then to dress him again when he was ready to leave. One day the office boy got Thurber's socks on wrong side out, and Helen Thurber noticed. The young man's name, Bernstein swears, was Truman Capote. ∎ John Skow