The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
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| Author | James Thurber |
|---|---|
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | short story |
| Released in | The New Yorker |
| Publication type | Magazine |
| Publisher | Harcourt, Brace and Company |
| Media Type | Print (Periodical, Hardback & Paperback) |
| Released | 1939 (magazine), 1942 (book) |
| Preceded by | "Death in the Zoo" |
| Followed by | "Interview with a Lemming" |
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1941) is a short story by James Thurber. 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). It has since been reprinted in James Thurber: Writings and Drawings (The Library of America, 1996, ISBN 1-883011-22-1). It was made into a 1947 movie of the same name, with Danny Kaye in the title role, though the movie is very different from the original story. 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.[1]
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[edit] Plot summary
The short story deals with a vague and mild-mannered man who drives his wife to the hairdressers, and then must run an errand while she is there. During this time he has five heroic daydream episodes. The first is as a pilot of a U.S. Navy flying boat in a storm, then he is a magnificent surgeon performing a one-of-a-kind surgery, then as a cool assassin testifying in a courtroom, and then as a Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot volunteering for a daring, secret suicide mission to bomb an ammunition dump. As the story ends, Mitty imagines himself fearlessly facing a firing squad, "inscrutable to the last."
[edit] Sources
It has been suggested[citation needed] that Thurber got the idea for Walter Mitty from a book by a leading British crime-fiction writer, Anthony Berkeley Cox. Cox, writing as Francis Isles ten years earlier, in a book called Malice Aforethought (Chapter 2), has a character named Dr. Bickleigh who, like Mitty, escapes from intolerable reality into fantasies markedly similar in character to those of Mitty. Cox/Isles was closely associated with other writers of crime-fiction, such as G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers, in the Detectives Club.[citation needed] Thurber, in "The Macbeth Murder Mystery" (a story published the same year as Mitty), demonstrated some familiarity with British detective fiction of the period, citing Agatha Christie and her character Hercule Poirot as well as the Leslie Ford characters Mr. Pinkerton and Inspector Bull.
Aside from this possible connection, however, Mitty is very much a Thurber character. 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. Like the man who saw the unicorn, he escapes via fantasies. 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.
In his 2001 book The Man Who Was Walter Mitty: The Life and Work of James Thurber (ISBN 0-930-75113-2), author Thomas Fensch suggests that the character was largely based on Thurber himself. 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", and with the character John Monroe in the 1969 television series My World and Welcome to It, who shares many of Thurber's biographical details (e.g as a writer-cartoonist for a New York magazine) but exhibits strong Walter Mitty tendencies as a distracted daydreamer.
Mitty's exaggerated heroics recall the exploits found in pulp fiction of the era, and Mitty's romanticised version of British pilots in the early days of World War II.
[edit] Wordplay
Thurber's love of wordplay can be seen in his coining of several nonsense terms in the story, including the pseudo-medical jargon "obstreosis of the ductal tract" and "Coreopsis has set in", and the recurring onomatopoeia of "pocketa-pocketa-pocketa".
[edit] 1947 film
The story was made into a 1947 movie, that stars Danny Kaye as a young daydreaming editor for a book publishing firm. The film was adapted for the screen by Ken Englund, Everett Freeman, and Philip Rapp, and directed by Norman Z. McLeod. It was filmed in Technicolor, a rarity at the time.
Thurber reportedly offered Samuel Goldwyn and MGM $10,000 not to make the film, and was very unhappy with the final result. Goldwyn had the writers customize the film to showcase Kaye's talents, altering the original story. The studio was more interested in making a financial success for Kaye's singing and comedic abilities, rather than what Thurber had intended.[citation needed]
[edit] 2009 film
At one time, producer-directors Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg, with a host of screenwriters, and Kevin Anderson as Mitty, were originally to remake the film, but it fell through. A different production is instead underway at Paramount Pictures, produced by Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., his brother John Goldwyn, and Richard Vane, with director Mark Waters. Owen Wilson has been cast as Mitty. The screenplay by Richard LaGravenese is reportedly is based more on the 1939 short story than the 1947 film, and will not be a musical comedy.
[edit] Stage adaptation
"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" was adapted to the stage by Thurber as part of the 1960 Broadway Theater revue A Thurber Carnival. The sketch, which closed the show except for "Word Dance Part II", was nearly identical to the short story, except that at the end he cleverly avoids being shot. The original cast for the sketch was as follows:
- Peggy Cass as Mrs. Mitty
- Tom Ewell as Walter Mitty
- Paul Ford as Mr. Pritchard-Mitford and The Leader
- John McGiver as Dr. Renshaw
- Wynne Miller as Nurse
- Peter Turgeon as Narrator, Lt. Berg, and Dr. Remington
- Charles Braswell as Dr. Benbow
[edit] In popular culture
- Although William Windom's role in the Thurber-inspired television series My World and Welcome to It was named for a different Thurber character, he is frequently subject to Mittyesque daydreams.
- The character was a major inspiration to the partially-animated show The Secret Lives of Waldo Kitty.
- Although the Thurber character is said not to be the inspiration for the Peanuts character Snoopy, he is described as having "a Walter Mitty complex".[2]
- The story (or possibly the film) is the basis for the Star Trek: Voyager sixth season episode "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy".
[edit] References
- ^ Walter Mitty (http://www.answers.com/topic/walter-mitty). The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition.. Houghton Mifflin Company (2004). Retrieved on February 13, 2007.
- ^ Walter Mitty. Who2. Who2, LLC (2007). Retrieved on February 13, 2007.
