Walter Mitty

From Free net 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. The term now appears in dictionaries to describe a person who lives a fantasy life.

It has been suggested that Thurber got the idea for Mitty from a book by a leading British crime-fiction writer, Anthony Berkeley Cox, writing as Francis Isles. His 1931 book Malice Aforethought has a character Dr. Bickleigh who, like Mitty, escapes from intolerable reality into fantasies similar in character to those of Mitty.

Film version

A film version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was released in 1947, starring Danny Kaye and directed by Norman McLeod. Thurber did not want Samuel Goldwyn and MGM to make this film, and even offered Goldwyn $10,000 not to. He was very unhappy with the final result, largely because Goldwyn had writers customize the film to showcase Kaye's dancing, singing and comic talents, altering the original story.

Use as an insult

The term can be used as an insult, as in two cases arising in British politics:

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

Also, in his book on selection for the Special Air Service, Andy McNab explains that people who give away the fact that they want to be in the SAS purely for reasons of personal vanity and are looking forward to being kitted out with Heckler and Koch equipment, are labeled as 'Walter Mittys' and quietly struck off and sent home.

Miscellaneous

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.nl:Walter Mitty