His World and Welcome to It : JAMES THURBER: His Life and Times,<i> By Harrison Kinney (Henry Holt and Co.: $40; 1,238 pp.)</i>

The obsession that led Harrison Kinney to write his epic new biography, “James Thurber: His Life and Times,” began when Kinney was a seventh-grader in Maine and stumbled on Thurber’s work at his local library. He seems to have been both awe-struck and star-struck by it. He went on to write a college thesis on Thurber, tracked down his hero at the New Yorker, landed a job there as a reporter under Harold Ross, the magazine’s legendary founding editor, and spent more than 40 years compiling the material that forms the substance of his exhaustive but ultimately winning book.

In Kinney’s portrait, James Thurber comes across as a gifted, troubled and often disagreeable man. Born in Columbus, Ohio, the town he made famous in his writing, he suffered a childhood mishap that marked him for life when an older brother accidentally blinded him in one eye with an arrow while they were playing a game. Thurber was shy by nature, and the accident increased his shyness and caused him to be clownish and awkward at times. He blamed his parents for not rushing him to a specialist and trying to save the damaged eye, and this perceived slight, Kinney writes, later became the focus for all his tumult and grief.

In high school, Thurber fell in love with the English language, acquired a reputation as a wit and turned into an avid reader, but he still showed no sign of his enormous talent as a writer. He washed in and out of Ohio State University and began to think that journalism might be his metier. Of particular interest during this period were his relations with women. He idealized them in the fashion of Henry James and remained a virgin until he “stepped aside” while traveling in France at the age of 25. His sexual initiation seems to have been traumatic, Kinney writes, and induced in him a form of nervous breakdown.

Within two years, Thurber was married and had embarked on what Kinney calls his “mockery of the female sex, developing a prejudice he would keep for a lifetime.” Thurber presents himself in print as a highbrow Archie Bunker. “A woman is a person who will advise you tragically, on any and all occasions, that she can’t take her hat off because her hair is a wreck,” he wrote at the time.

To the good, he was also cultivating a prose style and learning from such masters as H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. He went to France once more, got a job with the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune and found a literary agent in Manhattan to circulate his freelance pieces, starting down the road that would eventually lead to his triumphant career at the New Yorker.

In this multimedia age, it’s hard to imagine how powerful the magazine was in its first incarnation. It set standards, spotted trends and served as an emblem of sophisticated urban life. It was especially valued for its beautifully written light humor. Thurber had a knack for that, but he didn’t break in easily. His submissions came back so fast, in fact, that he “began to believe the New Yorker must have a rejection machine.” But he soon understood what Ross wanted--short, sharp features done in the chatty tone of a personal letter--and he was hired as a staffer in February 1927 with the help of E. B. White, who became one of his champions and dearest friends.

Ross had a genius for creating a psychological environment in which his maverick, brilliant, tormented and frequently drunken writers were allowed to flourish. Such key players as Thurber, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley had the status of Broadway stars and comported themselves accordingly. Drink would contribute to the death of many of them, including Thurber.

On the social background of the New Yorker, Kinney is very good indeed. He managed to interview virtually every important staff writer of the era, and his cross-cutting from one point of view to another provides a fresh look not only at Thurber but at the inner workings of the magazine. He is excellent, too, at tracing Thurber’s evolution into a first-rate humorist and recounting his successes.

Among the most charming aspects of Thurber was his skill as a draftsman. The drawings reproduced here hold up wonderfully. He did them with a minimum of fuss on whatever surface happened to be handy--a menu, a scrap of paper, a restaurant wall. (The Smithsonian Institution has preserved a wall fragment from the New Yorker’s old offices with a Thurber drawing on it.) His artwork suggests a world glimpsed in outline, in fleeting glances, a world of the half-sighted, and he gets a remarkable amount of energy into a few minimal pencil strokes. He was a deeply insecure person, but the drawings give no indication of that. Instead, they have a deftness and surety that must have gratified him.

Thurber earned a decent living on his articles, but the big money finally rolled in when his plays were produced and Hollywood came calling. He had divorced and remarried by then, and his one good eye had started to go bad. He was also plagued by a syndrome that affected many of his peers at the magazine--they tired of doing the sort of writing that they were known for, their trademark stuff, but they were too fixed in their ways to extend themselves. The New Yorker specialized in small, well-made prose pieces and in gem-like stories that did not rock the boat. Its editors shied away from any dark or upsetting vision and generated in consequence literature that was admirably done but, as one critic has put it, inevitably minor.

It seems that Thurber was bothered by his position in the literary pecking order. Kinney tells of his meetings with four major novelists--Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe--and notes that each went badly. Thurber appears not to have grasped that great books can be written by an inferior prose stylist like Wolfe. What he cared about most was the structure and effect of his sentences, and he aimed for perfection in six or seven pages. He often hit his target, but his artfully casual pieces did not amount to a work on the scale, say, of “The Sound and the Fury.” His brain was so used to conciseness, he complained once, that he lacked the ability to stretch out. That must have been frustrating for a creative spirit.

Thurber’s life ended sadly. He was almost completely blind at 45, yet he lived for almost 20 more years. It is a testament to his character that he still got some work done, mostly through dictation, but he gradually became more irascible and less stable and wound up offending everybody at the New Yorker with his book about Harold Ross (“The Years With Ross”), which was criticized for its unfair treatment of the founder. The times were changing, too, and William Shawn, Ross’ successor, was steering the magazine in a new direction, away from light humor toward weightier reporting. Thurber railed against it all and died of a massive brain tumor in 1961.

Kinney’s book is not without its faults, of course, and its 1,238-page length is chief among them. The word “leisurely” would be a kind way to describe the pace at which the story unfolds. We have to endure 300 pages before Thurber even gets to New York. The author has a tendency as well to regard the New Yorker with the same sort of devotion a practicing Catholic might demonstrate for the Vatican. One wishes, too, that he’d been more selective and analytical; the childhood episode that cost Thurber an eye, for example, is dismissed in a single paragraph.

It was E. B. White who warned Kinney that Thurber would not be a simple subject for a biography--White figured the project would take about 125 years--and we are fortunate that Kinney didn’t heed his advice. He has captured the essence of a sacred monster whose blindness has in it the seeds of a Greek tragedy, and we are left to ponder how a man so tortured by private demons could put together a body of work that rests so lightly on his readers and affords them so many comic pleasures.