The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
1939 short story by James Thurber
"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1939) 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), is available on-line on the New Yorker website, and is one of the most anthologized short stories in American literature. The story is considered one of Thurber's "acknowledged masterpieces". It was made into a 1947 film, with Danny Kaye in the title role, though the film is very different from the original story. It was also adapted into a 2013 film, directed by and starring Ben Stiller, and is again very different from the original.
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.
Plot
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. During this time he has five heroic daydream episodes, each inspired by some detail of his mundane surroundings. The first is as a pilot of a U.S. Navy flying boat in a storm, followed by Mrs.
The public source identifies “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” as 1939 short story by James Thurber. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Secret, Life and Walter.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2177112. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1939, 1942, 1996 and 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.