From Richard Nordquist,
Your Guide to Grammar & Composition.
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My Life and Hard Times is one of the shortest autobiographies on record--not because James Thurber had so little to say about himself but because he expressed himself so clearly and concisely (and, we must add, humorously). In the following paragraph, notice how Thurber helps to maintain our interest by varying the length of his sentences.

from My Life and Hard Times (1933)

by James Thurber

I passed all the other courses that I took at my university, but I could never pass botany. This was because all botany students had to spend several hours a week in a laboratory looking through a microscope at plant cells, and I could never see through a microscope. I never once saw a cell through a microscope. This used to enrage my instructor. He would wander around the laboratory pleased with the progress all the students were making in drawing the involved and, so I am told, interesting structure of flower cells, until he came to me. I would just be standing there. "I can’t see anything," I would say. He would begin patiently enough, explaining how anybody can see through a microscope, but he would always end up in a fury, claiming that I could too see through a microscope but just pretended that I couldn’t. "It takes away from the beauty of flowers anyway," I used to tell him. "We are not concerned with beauty in this course," he would say. "We are concerned solely with what I may call the mechanics of flars." "Well," I’d say, "I can’t see anything." "Try it just once again," he’d say, and I would put my eye to the microscope and see nothing at all, except now and again a nebulous milky substance--a phenomenon of maladjustment. You were supposed to see a vivid, restless clockwork of sharply defined plant cells. "I see what looks like a lot of milk," I would tell him. This, he claimed, was the result of my not having adjusted the microscope properly, so he would readjust it for me, or rather for himself. And I would look again and see milk.

James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times was originally published by Harper & Row in 1933. It was most recently republished by Harper in 1999.