The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The hyperbolic, tough-guy fantasies in Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1939) allude to a lurid world that, to readers of the time, was far from “secret.” Pulp magazines, named for their cheap woodpulp paper, were among the most popular entertainments of the time and an iconic part of the 1930s zeitgeist. During the Great Depression, when the book industry was in free-fall, pulps became a phenomenon due to their low retail cost and simple, vicarious thrills. In 1935—the height of pulp popularity—between nine and ten million Americans regularly ponied up a dime to choose between hundreds of titles: The Shadow, Black Mask, Submarine Stories, Doc Savage, Popular Detective, Amazing Stories, and many more.

Unlike the “slicks”—the more sophisticated magazines—the pulps did not risk boring their (predominantly male) readership with such frills as graceful writing, well-rounded characters, or narrative subtlety. Speed and sensation were all. The characters, according to one connoisseur, ran the gamut of “dangerous” men: “heroes and hellcats, frontiersmen and foreign legionnaires, loggers and leathernecks, spacemen and Mounties, monsters, and of course, maidens in distress—not to mention undress!” (Jim Steranko, qtd. in Lessner, Robert. Pulp Art, Gramercy, 1997).

Equally notorious was the cover art, whose lurid appeal was even more basic than the prose—which some customers did not even bother to read. Cover artists like Norman Saunders, George Rozen, and H. J. Ward laid bare the throbbing id of their readership in living color, turning newsstands into kaleidoscopic peepshows of rippling brawn, bare-toothed villainy, and sloe-eyed carnality. The “touselled” hair, “rakish” hats, “cold gray eyes,” and screaming damsels of Mitty’s secret life leaped off the page (Paragraphs 13, 1).

Like Mitty’s fantasy selves, pulp heroes lived by a patriarchal “code of chivalry,” which meant that they (mostly) obeyed the law, while fighting to protect the weak and virtuous, notably women (Lessner, 48). In 1939, when Thurber’s story first appeared, many pulp-savvy readers would have had intimate knowledge of every macho trope and credo being lampooned. Each of Mitty’s fantasies even alludes to a different pulp genre, e.g., seafaring titles like Submarine Stories (the “Commander” in Mitty’s first fantasy); the courtroom yarns of Erle Stanley Gardner (the murder trial); the WWI dogfights and bombers of Dare-Devil Aces and Battle Birds, and so on. In Thurber’s story, the terse sentences, rudimentary diction, shaky use of jargon, and explosive, two-fisted action (even amid a surgery procedure) of pulp are all intricately aped—and exaggerated—to near-farcical effect.

Pulps held immense fantasy appeal to many men in the 1930s, a time of unprecedented poverty, hopelessness, and drudgery; Mitty’s imaginative indulgence in such tropes as a proxy for real-world courage, success, and excitement would have made his character eminently relatable to many readers, despite the story’s satirical slant. And though the pulps have long gone, the Mittys live on, as evidenced by the 21st century’s boom in escapist cinema, especially superhero franchises and their “cosplay” fans who perform as their heroes in public. The new Walter Mittys, it seems, have won their battle with society: No longer do they feel compelled to keep their vicarious lives secret and separate.