On this day in 1939 James Thurber published "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" in The New Yorker. It became one of the most anthologized stories in American literature, and his "ta-poketa-poketa" hero became the archetype for dreamy, hapless, Thurber Man.
Thurber believed that the horror, the horror of life was fundamentally mechanical – "No man who has wrestled with a self-adjusting card table can ever be quite the man he once was" – but he had more than his share of the Mitty gene. He was such a fidgety, never-finished type that in the early days his exasperated wife would set the alarm clock for forty-five minutes and tell him to get something done – his first sale to The New Yorker came this way ... FULL STORY »
