For most of his career Thurber wrote short, whimsical pieces and drew cartoons for The New Yorker. Perhaps his least typical story, first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1941, was “You Could Look It Up,” about a struggling baseball team that hires a midget to pinch hit. Bill Veeck later acknowledged this tale as the idea behind his Eddie Gaedel stunt, and the title became a baseball catch phrase often repeated by Casey Stengel.
