The slippery narrative of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” shuttles between two wildly different worlds: one, the dreary routines and mundane settings (parking lot, grocery store, hotel lobby) of 1930s small-town America; the other, the exotic locales and bombastic derring-do of pulp magazines and Hollywood actioners. The effect is a comic portrait of a man woefully out of step with his time and place. This is not to say that the story does not have its serious side as well.

Thurber’s affectionate pulp parodies suggest that he was a longtime fan of melodramatic fiction, which makes him, in his way, a typical American man of his time. For most, these stories were just a fleeting diversion from the pressures of modern life. Walter Mitty, more of a personality sketch than a fully rounded character, may have come to Thurber by way of a simple question—what a person’s life or marriage must be like for them to choose these thrilling but emotionally (and intellectually) barren pulp worlds over the real one, and what this says about the modern world. There is then the question of whether these stories, with their outmoded values, actually make some readers less “masculine” by destroying their initiative.