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He drives away toward a parking lot and loses himself in another fantasy. Mitty’s wife observes that he seems tense, and when he drops her off in front of a hair styling salon, she reminds him to go buy overshoes and advises him to put on his gloves. The scene on the airplane is revealed to be one of Mitty’s many fantasies.
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Suddenly, the setting switches to an ordinary highway, where Walter Mitty and his wife are driving into a city to run errands. The crew members are scared but are buoyed by their commander’s confidence, and they express their faith in him. Plot SummaryĪs “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” begins, a military officer orders an airplane crew to proceed with a flight through a dangerous storm. In his later years, depressed by his health and by the anticommunist movement of the 1950s, which he opposed, Thurber’s writing became more pessimistic. In the 1940s, Thurber began losing his vision. After they divorced, he married Helen Wismer. His first marriage to Althea Adams lasted thirteen years and produced a daughter. Critical attention has focused largely on the comic aspect of his writing and not on the deeper themes and social satire present in his work. Regarded primarily as a humorist, Thurber’s reputation as a serious writer has suffered somewhat. Thurber gained recognition for his work from Williams College and Yale University, which awarded him honorary degrees, and his drawings were exhibited in international art shows. Thurber wrote fifteen drafts of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” a story of five pages, before he submitted it for publication. White’s literary skill influenced Thurber’s craft. White, who wrote the well-known children’s favorite Charlotte’s Web and other works. As a writer and editor at The New Yorker, Thurber worked with the versatile writer E. After attending Ohio State University, he worked as a newspaper reporter in Ohio, France, and New York before joining the staff of the The New Yorker in 1927. Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1894, and some of his writing, such as his “mock” memoirs, My Life and Hard Times, treat his experiences as a boy growing up in Ohio. Much of his work focused on the milieu of East Coast society. His work for the magazine established his reputation as a comic with a sophisticated sensibility who largely wrote about upper middle-class intellectuals. During the 1920s and 1930s, Thurber wrote for the popular and influential literary magazine, The New Yorker. James Thurber was a prolific writer and artist who published over twenty books of stories, biographies, drawings, sketches, essays, poetry, fables and cartoons. Mitty, and unhappy, ineffectual men, like Walter, fault his treatment of women and views of marriage. Others, referring to his tendency to portray domineering women, like Mrs. They have also discussed the darker themes of his work which lurk underneath the hilarity. More recently, critics have become attentive to Thurber’s literary prowess, such as his use of wordplay and attention to narrative form. Some critics dismissed his work as little more than formulaic and whimsical.
#The secret life of walter mitty movie
Today, people still describe a certain kind of neurotic, daydreaming man as a “Walter Mitty type.” In 1947, Hollywood released a movie of the same title, starring Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo.Īlthough his humorous stories, sketches, and illustrations were well-known during his lifetime, Thurber has received little scholarly attention. Upon the story’s publication, Walter Mitty became an archetypal American figure. The story’s main character is a middle-aged, middle-class man who escapes from the routine drudgery of his suburban life into fantasies of heroic conquest. It was reprinted in Thurber’s 1942 collection, My World- And Welcome To It and in Reader’s Digest in 1943. The story was first published in 1939 in the New Yorker magazine to great acclaim. James Thurber is one of America’s best known humorists, and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is his best known story.