The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber  

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a short story by James Thurber. It was made into a 1947 movie of the same name, with Danny Kaye in the title role.

The short story deals with an absent-minded man who drives his wife to the hairdressers, and then must run an errand while she is there. During this time he has four heroic daydream episodes. The first is as a pilot of a U.S. Navy flying boat in a horrific storm, then he is a magnificent surgeon performing a one-of-a-kind surgery, then as a cool assassin testifying in a courtroom, and finally as a Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot volunteering for a daring, secret suicide mission to bomb an ammunition dump.

It has been suggested[citation needed] that Thurber got the idea for Walter Mitty from a book by a leading British crime-fiction writer, Anthony Berkeley Cox. Cox, writing as Francis Isles ten years earlier, in a book called 'Malice Aforethought' (Chapter 2), has a character named Dr. Bickleigh who, like Mitty, escapes from intolerable reality into fantasies markedly similar in character to those of Mitty.

Cox/Isles was closely associated with other writers of crime-fiction, such as Chesterton and Sayers, in the Detectives Club. Thurber, in The Macbeth Murder Mystery, demonstrated that he was an avid fan of British detective fiction of the period.