Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index 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. In 1977, former British prime minister Harold Wilson sued an unofficial biographer for a work subtitled "the Yorkshire Walter Mitty". In 2003, a U.K government official publicly apologised for referring to the late David Kelly as "a Walter Mitty character". This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.