“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” was originally published in the March 18, 1939, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected in My World—and Welcome to It (1942). It is currently most readily available in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Penguin Classics).

One evening in December 1944 a group of foreign correspondents, some of whom had just come back from France, sat with friends in the warmth and deceptive safety of the Connaught Hotel in London having drinks. One of the correspondents was late. He came running in and said, “I've just made a great discovery.”

Of course, in that atmosphere of waiting for news of the Battle of the Bulge, and of V2 dodging, an alertness which is the positive use of fear, we all froze.

“Walter Mitty is to our generation what Spengler's Decline of the West was to the last,” he said. Maybe he was right. There is an element of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim or James Thurber's Walter Mitty in those who volunteer to go to war. It is a major part of survival.

But that evening, as so many evenings, we were doing what we had found to be the real business of war, waiting: waiting for action, waiting for disaster, waiting for it to be over. We were doing it in elegant comfort. There was no heroism for any of us beyond ears fine-tuned to the sky—not Conrad's stamina in a storm, only the demanded patience of the grey days.

This was far from the only time Walter Mitty was recognized in World War II. Bomber pilots in the Pacific theater made Ta pocketa pocketa pocketa pocketa pocketa an official password, and painted the “Mitty Society” emblem, two crossed Webley Vickers 50.80 heavy automatics, on their fuselages. That was in honor of Walter Mitty. Who but Kilroy has entered more quickly into folklore?

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” set on one uneventful morning in the life of a shy henpecked dreamer of a certain age (“Don't forget your overshoes.”), is just seven pages long. It encompasses his life, my life, and maybe your life. Mitty's wife is drawn so deftly and with so few strokes that Thurber gives us permission to sympathize with her.