Walter Mitty
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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.
A film version of the story was released in 1947 starring Danny Kaye and directed by Norman McLeod.
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.