SOURCE: “Walter Mitty and Lord Jim,” in English Language Notes, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1987, pp. 74–7.

In the following essay, Secor determines how the character of Walter Mitty reflects the image of Joseph Conrad's creation, Lord Jim.

James Thurber first encountered Joseph Conrad in a college course taught by a favorite teacher, Joseph Taylor, and he soon learned to share his professor's enthusiasm for the English novelist.¹ Throughout his life, Thurber seemed to be almost haunted by the image of Conrad, who represented for him a romantic ideal against which he measured both himself and his characters. Of all Conrad's creations, Lord Jim was most firmly imbedded in Thurber's romantic imagination. He came to mind easily, for example, when Thurber described Captain Darke for The New Yorker. Meeting the captain in the Florida Keys—a tall, dark, melancholy man with his white shirt open at his throat—Thurber was instantly reminded...