| When James Thurber joined the staff of The New Yorker, in 1927, he stood out partly for his habit of doodling on walls. This week, nearly a century later, one of Thurber’s doodlings—among the thousand he contributed to the magazine—resurfaces on the cover of our annual Archive Issue. The theme this year is Animals, and Thurber’s gentle, hieroglyphic-like dogs and birds can be spotted throughout the printed pages, adorning animal-themed articles from the past. Thurber’s drawings enlivened the magazine for decades, but he was “first, last, and always a writer,” according to the New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb. Today, Thurber is perhaps best known for “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” his fanciful short story from 1939. That same year, Thurber wrote and illustrated “Fables for Our Time,” a series of Aesop-inspired allegories that put an otherworldly spin on classic human conundrums. In one, a mouse’s vacation plans go awry; in another, a little girl shows a big bad wolf who’s boss (“Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be”). The tales tease out the tensions between women and men, winners and losers, and youth and age. For Thurber, our modern follies, recast by the relative innocence of the animal world, call out what’s ancient and animal about the human. | 
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