From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Walter Mitty is a fictional character in James Thurber's short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, published in 1941. Mitty is a meek, mild man with a vivid fantasy life: in a few dozen paragraphs he imagines himself a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a devil-may-care killer. He has become such a standard for the role that his name appears in several dictionaries.^[1].

The character was played by Danny Kaye in the 1947 film version, and is scheduled to be played by Owen Wilson in a future film version. Thurber opposed the 1947 production, possibly because it trivialized a darker and more significant message underlying the text. It is possible to read the events in the story as the responses to the stress of reality by an aging man who is sliding into senescence. In the brief snatches of reality that punctuate Mitty's fantasies we meet well-meaning but insensitive strangers who inadvertently rob Mitty of some of his remaining dignity. His wife is the only inhabitant of reality that we meet more than once. Thurber cleverly leads us into accepting her as a nag by giving Mitty's fantasies a charming lightness and comic-book simplicity that disarms deeper scrutiny. On the other hand, her final appearance suggests that she is a woman struggling to cope as her role shifts from loving life-partner to care-giver as Mitty slowly slides into his second childhood.

In 1977, Andrew Roth entitled his biography of former British prime minister Harold Wilson Sir Harold Wilson: the Yorkshire Walter Mitty. Wilson successfully sued Roth for libel arising out of a section of the book referring to Wilson's wife.

In his 1992 biography of Henry Kissinger, Walter Isaacson records that on 6 October 1973, during the October War, Kissinger urged President Richard Nixon's assistant, General Alexander Haig to keep Nixon in Florida in order to avoid "any hysterical moves" and to "keep any Walter Mitty tendencies under control."^[2]

In 2003, Tom Kelly, a spokesman for British prime minister Tony Blair, publicly apologised for referring to David Kelly as "a Walter Mitty character" during a private discussion with a journalist.

In 2007, Automaker Ford admitted that it had to weed out "Walter Mitty" types who had dreams but no experience, prior to the sale of their Aston Martin British GT car brand to a consortium of business interests from America and the Middle East, headed by Prodrive founder and world rally championship owner David Richards.

In his book on selection for the Special Air Service, Andy McNab wrote that people who give away the fact that they want to be in the SAS for reasons of personal vanity are labeled as 'Walter Mittys' and quietly sent home.

Also, there is a term in military slang, "Walt", which is an abbreviation of Walter Mitty, which refers to someone who has aspirations to become a soldier, but none of the necessary personal qualities. This bit of slang can also refer to someone who poses as an (ex-) soldier but who isn't a soldier (serving or former) or who poses as something he isn't or wasn't. (e.g. a logistics soldier who poses as an SAS trooper, or a member of the Legion of Frontiersmen).

• Mitty was not the first fictional character to escape from intolerable reality into fantasies. British crime-fiction writer Anthony Berkeley Cox included a similar character in his 1931 book Malice Aforethought, which he wrote under the pen name Francis Iles.
• The character served as the model for the Waldo Kitty character of the mid-70s (Filmation).
• Walter Mitty is referenced in the lyrics to the song "Sex and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll" by Ian Dury, "In The City" by Madness, "Dreams" by The Descendents, "All Dressed Up For San Francisco" by The Philosopher Kings, and "Sammy Davis City" by Joe Strummer and Brian Setzer.
• The Peanuts character Snoopy is a type of Walter Mitty, as is Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes.
• On the Indian television, the character Mungerilal is a Walter Mitty. Day-dreams are often referred to as "Mungerilal ke haseen sapne" in Hindi, which means "Mungerilal's beautiful day-dreams"
• The character of Ally McBeal, played by Callista Flockhart and created by David E. Kelley, is also a typical example of a Walter Mitty, notwithstanding the fact that she is a female.