The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

This story was first published on March 18, 1939, in The New Yorker. It is protected by copyright and cannot be reproduced here in full. What follows is an overview of the story, its historical significance, major themes, and literary analysis to support students, teachers, and readers.

Publication History and Cultural Impact

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" appeared in the March 18, 1939, issue of The New Yorker and was collected the following year in My World—and Welcome to It. It became the most famous American short story of its era and arguably the most widely anthologized short story of the twentieth century. The character of Walter Mitty entered popular culture so completely that "a Walter Mitty" became a dictionary entry—Merriam-Webster defines it as "a commonplace unadventurous person who seeks escape from reality through daydreaming."  The story has been adapted into two major films: a 1947 comedy starring Danny Kaye and a 2013 adventure-drama starring Ben Stiller, though neither captures the precise comic melancholy of Thurber's original.

Plot Summary

Walter Mitty, a mild-mannered, middle-aged man, is driving his wife to Waterbury, Connecticut, for her weekly appointment at the hairdresser. As they speed along the highway, Mitty slips into his first daydream: he is Commander Mitty, piloting a Navy hydroplane through a terrible hurricane while his crew looks to him with unwavering confidence. "We're going through!" he shouts over the roaring engines. His wife's sharp voice snaps him back—he's been driving too fast—and she reminds him to buy overshoes and to put on his gloves.

After dropping her off, Mitty drives past a hospital and enters his second fantasy: he is now Dr. Mitty, a world-famous surgeon called in to save a millionaire banker whose case has baffled every other specialist. A complicated machine goes "pocketa-pocketa-pocketa" and breaks down; Mitty coolly repairs it with a fountain pen. A parking-lot attendant's impatient honking pulls him out of the reverie. Humiliated—he always has trouble with the parking—Mitty wanders the streets trying to remember what his wife told him to buy.

A newsboy shouting headlines triggers the third daydream: Mitty is now a crack shot on trial for murder, coolly facing down the district attorney and announcing he could have killed the victim at three hundred feet with his left hand. Then, as Mitty waits for his wife in a hotel lobby, idly picking up a copy of Liberty magazine, he becomes Captain Mitty, a World War I flying ace who volunteers for a suicide mission, drinking brandy and strapping on his Webley-Vickers automatic. "The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh," someone says. "With Mitty there, nothing to worry about." 

His wife finds him in the chair. "I've been looking all over this hotel for you," she says. She asks if he's feeling ill. He says no. They walk to the parking lot. She ducks into a drugstore, and Mitty stands against a wall, waiting. In the final fantasy—the most compressed and powerful—Walter Mitty faces a firing squad. He stands straight, motionless, proud: "Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last."

Themes and Analysis

Fantasy Versus Reality

The story's central engine is the collision between Mitty's extravagant inner life and his deflating outer circumstances. Each daydream casts him as a figure of supreme competence—commander, surgeon, marksman, pilot—while each return to reality finds him fumbling with tire chains, forgetting his errands, and submitting to his wife's instructions. Thurber neither condemns Mitty's fantasies nor celebrates them uncritically; instead, he holds both worlds in comic suspension, letting the reader feel both the absurdity and the pathos of the gap between them.

Emasculation and Gender Dynamics

Mrs. Mitty is one of Thurber's characteristic commanding women: brisk, practical, perpetually correcting her husband. She is not cruel, but she is relentless, and her dominance over the small details of Mitty's life—his driving speed, his gloves, his overshoes—mirrors the authority figures (parking attendants, traffic cops) who humiliate him in the public world. Mitty's fantasies are compensatory: in each one, he commands respect, obedience, and even awe. The story can be read as Thurber's wry commentary on mid-century American marriage and the quiet desperation of domesticated masculinity.

Escapism and the Heroic Imagination

Rather than dismissing Mitty as pathetic, Thurber grants his daydreams a genuine grandeur. The prose in the fantasy sequences is deliberately heightened—taut, rhythmic, full of technical jargon and dramatic dialogue—while the "real" passages are flat and prosaic. This stylistic contrast suggests that the imagination is not merely an escape from life but a parallel life of equal or greater intensity. The final image of Mitty facing the firing squad "undefeated, inscrutable to the last" elevates him from a comic figure to something approaching the tragic.

The Mundane Versus the Heroic

Thurber's genius lies in the precision of his mundane details—puppy biscuits, overshoes, the brand name of a tire chain—juxtaposed against the operatic scale of the fantasies. The humor arises not from the fantasies themselves, which are played straight, but from the abrupt transitions between worlds: one moment Mitty is saving a life in the operating room, the next he is being honked at by a parking attendant. The recurring nonsense sound "pocketa-pocketa-pocketa" bridges both worlds, appearing as the noise of a hydroplane engine, a hospital machine, and a flame thrower.

Literary Devices

Juxtaposition: The story's structure alternates between fantasy and reality with increasing speed, creating a rhythm that is both comic and poignant. Each daydream is richer and more dangerous than the last, while each return to reality is more deflating.

Onomatopoeia: The recurring "ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa" is Thurber's most famous invention—a meaningless machine noise that links Mitty's fantasies and becomes a kind of verbal signature for the boundary between dream and waking.

Stream of Consciousness: The transitions between fantasy and reality are seamless, often triggered by a single sensory detail—a newsboy's shout, a revolving door, a magazine photograph—suggesting that Mitty's inner world is always just below the surface.

Humor and Pathos: Thurber achieves a tone that is simultaneously funny and sad. We laugh at Mitty's incompetence in the real world and at the absurd grandeur of his fantasies, but we also recognize in him a universal human impulse—the desire to be more than we are.

Why This Story Is Taught in Schools

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" remains a staple of English and American literature curricula because it is short enough to read in a single class period, accessible to students of all levels, and rich enough to sustain sophisticated literary analysis. It introduces key narrative concepts—point of view, irony, juxtaposition, characterization through action—in a form that students genuinely enjoy reading. Its central theme—the gap between who we are and who we wish to be—resonates with readers of every age, making it an ideal text for classroom discussion about identity, imagination, and the nature of heroism.

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