The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The hyperbolic, tough-guy fantasies in Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1939) allude to a lurid world that, to readers of the time, was far from “secret.” Pulp magazines, named for their cheap woodpulp paper, were among the most popular entertainments of the time and an iconic part of the 1930s zeitgeist. During the Great Depression, when the book industry was in free-fall, pulps became a phenomenon due to their low retail cost and simple, vicarious thrills. In 1935—the height of pulp popularity—between nine and ten million Americans regularly ponied up a dime to choose between hundreds of titles: The Shadow, Black Mask, Submarine Stories, Doc Savage, Popular Detective, Amazing Stories, and many more.

Unlike the “slicks”—the more sophisticated magazines—the pulps did not risk boring their (predominantly male) readership with such frills as graceful writing, well-rounded characters, or narrative subtlety. Speed and sensation were all. The characters, according to one connoisseur, ran the gamut of “dangerous” men: “heroes and hellcats, frontiersmen and foreign legionnaires, loggers and leathernecks, spacemen and Mounties, monsters, and of course, maidens in distress—not to mention undress!” (Jim Steranko, qtd. in Lessner, Robert. Pulp Art, Gramercy, 1997).

Equally notorious was the cover art, whose lurid appeal was even more basic than the prose—which some customers did not even bother to read.