Just Before The War With The Eskimos

James Thurber's Short Story Collection: What It Actually Is and Whether You Should Read It

Just Before The War With The Eskimos is a 1944 collection of thirteen short stories by James Thurber, published by Harper & Brothers. It sits chronologically between his earlier work The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and his later The Fables for Our Time. Most people know Thurber from Walter Mitty, which is fair because that story got anthologized into oblivion. But reading the full collection reveals a writer who was already deeply into exhaustion-by-absurdity well before the postwar era made that mode seem fresh. The title story is a long comedic piece in which the narrator watches with mounting bewilderment as his wife's cousin, George, moves through a series of increasingly ridiculous situations at a social gathering. George is Thurber's recurring Everyman archetype — well-meaning, deeply clumsy, perpetually one step away from catastrophe. The premise of an imminent war with Alaska Native peoples is never actually realized. It functions as a running joke about American anxiety and the way people fill silence with nonsense when faced with genuine uncertainty. Thurber wrote this during World War II. That context matters. He wasn't satirizing Eskimo relations the way someone might today. He was satirizing how Americans talked about threats they understood almost nothing about. The humor comes from the gap between casual conversation and the actual scale of what was happening globally. People discussed military strategy at dinner parties the way they used to discuss the weather.

Other stories in the collection include "The Stolen Santa Claus," "The Dog That Inherited Money," and "The Wife's Birthday Present." They share a tone — domestic situations escalating toward surreal breakdowns. Thurber's prose is deliberately flat. He describes absurd events with the same cadence you'd use reporting on a leaky faucet. The comedy lives in that distance between subject and delivery. One thing beginners miss about Thurber is that his drawings aren't cute illustrations. They're structural components of the humor. The stick figures and crooked lines do half the work. A character's emotional state is often communicated through the drawing more clearly than through any description Thurber writes. I've seen people read Thurber aloud and get almost none of the laughs because they were ignoring the artwork. The text says one thing. The drawing says another. The friction between them is where the joke actually lives. You need to see both simultaneously for the piece to function. The collection isn't uniformly strong. "The Last Flower" drags. "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" appears again here even though it had already been collected in 1939, which makes the compilation feel slightly padded. Some stories land because of Thurber's timing with others fizzle because the premise runs out of steam before the ending arrives. Expect roughly eight or nine genuinely great pieces and four or five that you'll tolerate. That's honestly better than most comedy collections from that period.

Where Thurber actually struggles is in repetition of effect. After the sixth story, you start recognizing the pattern — ordinary situation, mild inciting incident, gradual escalation, sudden surreal collapse. It's reliable. Reliability becomes fatigue. A few reviewers from the forties noted this and Thurber's later work got weirder and more fragmented partly as a reaction against his own successful formula. That's fair. No writer sustains a single comic register indefinitely without the material starting to sound manufactured. If you're approaching Thurber for the first time, start with the title story and "The Stolen Santa Claus." Those two represent the collection at its most accessible. If you finish those and still want more, go backward through the rest. Don't read cover to cover linearly. Thurber knew he was funny in bursts, not marathons. A practical note on editions. The original Harper paperback from the fifties and sixties has some of the best reproductions of Thurber's drawings. The illustrations stayed sharp because they were halftoned directly from Thurber's pen-and-ink originals. Modern reprints often run the artwork through digital compression and the humor loses texture. The line work gets muddy. I found this out the hard way when a library copy of the collection had drawings that looked like they'd been photocopied through a cheap machine twice. Switched to the illustrated Thurber edition and the difference was immediate. The art is part of the writing. Don't treat it as decoration.

Thurber died in 1961. His work went somewhat dormant through the seventies before being rediscovered by writers like David Sedaris and Nick Hornby, who cited him as an influence. If that trajectory interests you, the Thurber collection is a reasonable entry point. It's shorter than his later works and the humor translates across decades without requiring historical knowledge you wouldn't already have. The wartime references are faint enough that they don't date the book unpleasantly. The domestic absurdity is timeless.