3 turret!” The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window.

“Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through!” The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We’re going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. Mitty’s daydreams take their cues from radio and matinee melodramas, and they’re convincing because Thurber had such a flawless ear for the conventions of commercial storytelling. Read “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and you get a thumbnail index of the qualities that made Thurber so memorable in his many other writings.įirst and foremost, the story showcases Thurber’s skills as a parodist. In this way, “Mitty” is a kind of touchstone for understanding Thurber, whose fanciful mind allowed him to see a fabulist world in his modest Ohio childhood and to transcend the grim hardships of his later years by making lyrical stories and pictures. What Thurber seems to say is that imagination can be the highest form of grace, the stuff of story that makes life resonate with meaning. Mitty is not just a dawdler he’s a creative genius. The alternate universe that Mitty constructs is every bit as real to him-and to the reader-as the blander one where Mitty keeps a physical address. Thurber seemed quite deliberate in referring to the secret life of Walter Mitty. His daydreams are works of art in themselves-self-contained worlds that become, in their vivid detail and gripping dialog, miniature masterpieces of the mind. The movie treatments really miss the magic of the original, which hints that Mitty is up to something more than mere escapism in his fantasies. What we get is an overblown homily on the virtues of self-actualization-James Thurber by way of Dale Carnegie. Ben Stiller’s 2013 portrayal of Walter Mitty veers from Thurber even more, as the repressed hero decides to give up daydreaming to search out adventures worthy of Indiana Jones. The 1947 version starring Danny Kaye includes a subplot in which the real-life Mitty tangles with jewel thieves-a revision that, in juicing up Walter’s humdrum existence, destroys the interior logic of Thurber’s source material. Hollywood has adapted the story twice, getting it wrong each time. First published in 1939, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” follows the title character, a henpecked husband, as he daydreams more dramatic versions of himself, either as a military pilot, star surgeon, or defendant in a murder trial.

Thurber my life and hard times