I have always considered James Thurber one of literature's minor pleasures. He has a quick, deft intelligence, an engaging prose style, and a superb eye for life's many inconsistencies, particularly those we act out in what used to be referred to as "the battle of the sexes."

Such skirmishes were usually staged in the living room (often with cocktails), the bedroom (conversation only), or in the family automobile going to or returning from a gathering of: a) starchy and/or lunatic relations; b) the boss and assorted sycophantic and back-stabbing flunkeys; or, c) his tipsy golf buddies and/or her catty coffee klatch companions.

Thurber helped to usher in a golden age of humor, running roughly through the first third of the 20th century. The heavyweights during this time were probably Sinclair Lewis and H.L. Mencken, followed by Thurber and then, in no particular order, Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker, E.B. White, Robert Benchley, William Saroyan, Don Marquis, George Herriman and other lesser lights.

If some of the names are unfamiliar, you might ruminate on what the odds are that in 70 or 80 years Dave Barry and Calvin Trillin will be on the shelves at the local library, rather than down in "special collections" in the deepest, dankest depths of the storage basement.

Best known for his short story, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and his wonderfully understated cartoons, Thurber was born in 1894 and, by the evidence of this 800-page collection of his letters, must have started belaboring the postal service shortly thereafter and not flagged until his death in 1961. This volume is clearly meant to supersede the now out-of-print Selected Letters of James Thurber,(1980), a mere slip of a book at 274 pages.

The inclusion here of so many more letters works both for and against the reader. In its favor is that Thurber comes from an era when people were real letter writers. Long, detailed, and packed with anecdote and analysis, the correspondence here forms a kind of bumpy autobiography where the wheels of his life slam down hard on parts of the road and pass mysteriously over others.

Thurber was a relentless soul-searcher in his letters and right from the start took to examining the peculiarities of his love life with the absorption of a monkey grooming himself for fleas - far too many of these coy, tedious and wordy letters are included (a rule of thumb is that any time you see a letter addressed to a girlfriend or old college chum, skip it).

At the opposite end, though, are any letters written to E.B. White, Katherine White, Harold Ross or a good number of other writers and editors. What comes through in this correspondence is the care and commitment Thurber felt for the act of writing.

Here, Thurber writes to Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker, to complain of minor changes to the pieces Thurber wrote for the magazine: "Since I never write, for publication, a single word or phrase that I have not consciously examined, sometimes numerous times, I should like to have the queriers on my pieces realize that there is no possibility of catching me up on an overlooked sloppiness. I think I can say this, without smugness, but with some fire."

Thurber goes on to point out that an unauthorized comma dropped into one of his sentences spoiled it in his judgment - turning it into something "that is simply not English."

Admittedly, Thurber could be quite prickly about his status as a "humorous" writer, often feeling there was a "tendency to regard my constructions as hastily batted out." Thurber tells a wonderful story on himself when, in a letter from 1949, he describes the only time he ever met the notoriously long-winded and self-absorbed novelist Thomas Wolfe.

Wolfe had come to a party Thurber was throwing in his New York apartment, and long after everyone had left, Wolfe was still there bemoaning his fate: "About 4 a.m., everybody else having left . . . Wolfe told my wife and me that we didn't know what it was to be a writer. 'My husband is a writer,' said Mrs. Thurber. 'I didn't know that,' said Wolfe, 'all I see of his is in the New Yorker.'"

What keeps a reader going in a book like this is its many surprises: finding, for instance, that Thurber had a lifelong love of Henry James and had many intelligent things to say about a writer from whom he could hardly be more different; or his affectionate admonition to fellow New Yorker staff writer, E.B. White, who was experiencing a writing slump, to just get it down on paper because "Nobody can write anything who doesn't"; or a letter to an old flame apologizing for his bad behavior that ends with the mawkish confession that "I have to make the family believe that I'm the normal one, so don't let on" - followed by an eerie six typewritten lines of "ha ha ha's" and the almost sinister sign off: "Amusedly yours, Jamie."

After reading these letters and looking back at some of his many wonderful stories, I am still inclined to the notion that Thurber is a minor pleasure. He had a mind of broad interest but narrow view: he could not see the forest for the trees but was a masterly describer of those trees and the antics of the small creatures scampering about them.

I suspect that Thurber himself, rather than be represented by the many maudlin, tortured and narcissistic letters included in this volume, would prefer to be remembered for the simple details he saw in the lives around him, as in this fine, chatty letter from 1928 to an old flame: "The weather here is fine, Alice and the twins are here, your uncle fell and broke his foot, your Aunt Emma is blinder than usual and lost her crutch, the top is gone off the percolator again . . . your cousin Arthur has the prickly heat, their child isn't going to be smart, I guess, he's two now but hasn't said anything since he was born, he gets it from your grandfather, who didn't say anything to the day he died except 'How is McKinley now.' "

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.