Walter Mitty - Use of The Term

Use of The Term

When referencing actor Errol Flynn, Warner Brothers studio head, Jack 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".

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."

In 2003, Tom Kelly, a spokesman for British prime minister Tony Blair, publicly apologised for referring to David Kelly as "a Walter Mitty character" during a private discussion with a journalist.

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".

Terry Gilliam described his film Brazil as "1984 meets the Secret Life of Walter Mitty."