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Walter Mitty is a fictional character in James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", first published in ''The New Yorker'' on March 18, 1939, and in book form in ''My World and Welcome to It'' in 1942. Thurber loosely based the character on his friend, Walter Mithoff. It was made into a film in 1947, with a remake directed by and starring Ben Stiller released in 2013. 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 character's name has come into more general use to refer to an ineffectual dreamer and appears in several dictionaries.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title =Walter Mitty )〕 ''The American Heritage Dictionary'' defines a Walter Mitty as "an ordinary, often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic daydreams of personal triumphs".〔Walter Mitty. (n.d.). ''The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'', Fourth Edition. Retrieved May 29, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/walter_mitty〕 The most famous of Thurber's inept male protagonists, the character is considered "the archetype for dreamy, hapless, Thurber Man". Although the story has humorous elements, there is a darker and more significant message underlying the text, leading to a more tragic interpretation of the Mitty character. Even in his heroic daydreams, Mitty does not triumph, several fantasies being interrupted before the final one sees Mitty dying bravely in front of a firing squad. In the brief snatches of reality that punctuate Mitty's fantasies the audience meets well-meaning but insensitive strangers who inadvertently rob Mitty of some of his remaining dignity. == Use of the term == When referencing actor Errol Flynn, Warner Brothers studio head, Jack L. Warner, noted in his autobiography, ''My First Hundred Years in Hollywood'', "To the Walter Mittys of the world he () was all the heroes in one magnificent, sexy, animal package". In his 1992 biography of Henry Kissinger, Walter Isaacson records that on 6 October 1973, during the 1973 Arab Israeli War, Kissinger urged President Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff General Alexander Haig to keep Nixon in Florida in order to avoid "any hysterical moves" and to "keep any Walter Mitty tendencies under control".〔("The October War and U.S. Policy" ), October 7, 2003, National Security Archives〕 In the 1997 text ''Into Thin Air'' by Jon Krakauer—a personal account of the events of the 1996 Everest disaster—Krakauer states: "Walter Mittys with Everest dreams need to bear in mind that when things go wrong up in the death zone (above 26,000 feet)—and sooner or later they always do—the strongest guides in the world may be powerless to save a client's life; indeed as the events of 1996 demonstrated, the strongest guides in the world are sometimes powerless to save even their own lives."〔Krakauer, p. 275.〕 In the 1999 autobiography John Glenn: A Memoir by Mercury astronaut and US Senator John Glenn, on page 198 he states, "The average person could Walter Mitty him- or herself into winning the Indianapolis 500, since everybody drove a car; all you had to do was imagine yourself going faster and making nothing but left turns. But space was so new nobody had a way to relate to it realistically." In 2007, Automaker Ford admitted that it had to exclude from the list of potential bidders "Walter Mitty" types who had dreams but no experience, prior to the sale of their Aston Martin British GT car brand to a consortium of business interests from America and the Middle East, headed by Prodrive founder and world rally championship owner David Richards. ''The Guardian'' reported on 20 April 2009 that a leaked British National Party training manual described some members as "liars, oddballs, and Walter Mitty types".〔("BNP says some members are oddballs and liars" ). ''The Guardian''. 20 April 2009. Retrieved 01 May 2009.〕 Terry Gilliam described his film ''Brazil'' as "Walter Mitty Meets Franz Kafka". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Walter Mitty」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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