My Life and Hard Times

My Life and Hard Times (1933) is James Thurber's comic masterpiece. In nine short chapters he recounts the chaos of his childhood: the night the bed fell on his father, the day the dam broke (it didn't), his grandfather's conviction that the Civil War was still being fought, and the family's heroic struggles with electricity, automobiles, and each other. E.B. White called it 'one of the great American memoirs.'