In the smoky offices of a brand-new magazine, E.B. White fishes a crumpled, childish pencil sketch of a seal out of a trash can. That rescued scrap of paper launched the artistic career of James Thurber and redefined what visual comedy could be in the 20th century.

This deep dive explores how a man who was legally blind for much of his career, and who considered himself a late bloomer, used a staggering internal imagination to cope with profound physical and emotional loss, turning that pain into masterpieces like The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

• The childhood archery accident that cost him an eye and forged the near-photographic memory that became his creative engine
• How he and a young William Shirer hallucinated the news for a Paris newspaper, like a human large-language model
• The 45-minute alarm-clock trick tha ...