![]() ![]() This is consistent with Thurber's self-described imaginative interpretations of shapes seen with his "two-fifths vision" in his essay "The Admiral on the Wheel". In his 2001 book The Man Who Was Walter Mitty: The Life and Work of James Thurber ( ISBN 0-93), author Thomas Fensch suggests that the character was largely based on Thurber himself. A similar dynamic is found in the Thurber story "The Curb in the Sky", in which a man starts recounting his own dreams as anecdotes as an attempt to stop his wife from constantly correcting him on the details. ![]() Like the man who saw the unicorn, he escapes via fantasies. Like many of his male characters, such as the husband in " The Unicorn in the Garden" and the physically unimposing men Thurber often paired with larger women in his cartoons, Mitty is dominated and put upon by his wife. Mitty is very much a Thurber protagonist, so much so that he has been called "the archetype for dreamy, hapless, Thurber Man". The closing firing-squad scene comes when Mitty is standing against a wall, smoking.Mitty's fourth daydream comes as he waits for his wife and picks up an old copy of Liberty, reading "Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?", and envisions himself fighting Germany while volunteering to pilot a plane normally piloted by two people.The courtroom drama cliché "Perhaps this will refresh your memory", which begins the third fantasy, follows Mitty's attempt to remember what his wife told him to buy, when he hears a newsboy shouting about "the Waterbury Trial".Mitty's turn as a brilliant surgeon immediately follows his taking off and putting on his gloves as a surgeon dons surgical gloves, and driving past a hospital.Mitty's complaint that Mitty is "driving too fast". The powering up of the "Navy hydroplane" in the opening scene is followed by Mrs.As the story ends, Mitty imagines himself facing a firing squad, "inscrutable to the last."Įach of the fantasies is inspired by some detail of Mitty's mundane surroundings: Navy flying boat in a storm, then he is a magnificent surgeon performing a one-of-a-kind surgery, then as a deadly assassin testifying in a courtroom, and then as a Royal Air Force pilot volunteering for a daring, secret suicide mission to bomb an ammunition dump. During this time he has five heroic daydream episodes. The short story deals with a vague and mild-mannered man who drives into Waterbury, Connecticut, with his wife for their regular weekly shopping and his wife's visit to the beauty parlor. Warner in his autobiography My First Hundred Years in Hollywood, described the actor Errol Flynn in the following way: "To the Walter Mittys of the world he was all the heroes in one magnificent, sexy, animal package." The name Walter Mitty and the derivative word " Mittyesque" have entered the English language, denoting an ineffectual person who spends more time in heroic daydreams than paying attention to the real world, or more seriously, one who intentionally attempts to mislead or convince others that he is something that he is not. It was also adapted into a 2013 film, which is again very different from the original. It was made into a 1947 film of the same name, with Danny Kaye in the title role, though the film is very different from the original story. The story is considered one of Thurber's "acknowledged masterpieces". It has since been reprinted in James Thurber: Writings and Drawings (The Library of America, 1996, ISBN 1-88), is available on-line on the New Yorker website, and is one of the most anthologized short stories in American literature. The most famous of Thurber's stories, it first appeared in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939, and was first collected in his book My World and Welcome to It ( Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942). The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1939) is a short story by James Thurber. Print ( Periodical, Hardback and Paperback) For the 2013 film, see The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 film). For the 1947 film, see The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947 film). This article is about the original short story.
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