He became part of the ' Young Vienna' movement ( Jung-Wien) and soon received work as a full-time art and theater critic for Vienna's press ( Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, Zeit). He also began submitting poems and book reviews to journals. When his father went bankrupt, the sixteen-year-old Salten quit school and began working for an insurance agency. When he was four weeks old, his family relocated to Vienna, as many Jews did after the Imperial government had granted full citizenship rights to Jews in 1867. He was the grandson of an Orthodox rabbi.

His father was Fülöp Salzmann, the telegraph office's clerk in Pest his mother was Maria Singer. Salten was born Siegmund Salzmann on 6 September 1869 in Pest, Austria-Hungary. Disney began working on the film immediately, intending it to be the company’s second feature-length animated film and his first to be based on a specific, recent work.Israelitischer Friedhof (Friesenberg), Fluntern, Zurich, Switzerlandįelix Salten ( German: 6 September 1869 – 8 October 1945) was an Austro-Hungarian author and literary critic in Vienna. Deciding such a film would be too difficult to make, he sold the rights to Walt Disney in April 1937 in hopes of it being adapted into an animated film instead. Sidney Franklin, a producer and director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, purchased the film rights in 1933, initially desiring to make a live-action adaptation of the work. With World War II looming, Max Schuster aided the Jewish Salten’s flight from Nazi Germany and helped introduce him, and Bambi, to Walt Disney Productions. However, it was subsequently banned in Nazi Germany in 1936 as “political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe.” Many copies of the novel were burned, making original first editions rare and difficult to find.

Salten published a sequel, Bambis Kinder, eine Familie im Walde ( Bambi’s Children), in 1939.īambi was “hugely popular” after its publication, becoming a “book-of-the-month” selection and selling 650,000 copies in the United States by 1942. An English translation by Whittaker Chambers was published in North America by Simon & Schuster in 1928, and the novel has since been translated and published in over 30 languages around the world. The novel traces the life of Bambi, a male roe deer, from his birth through childhood, the loss of his mother, the finding of a mate, the lessons he learns from his father and experience about the dangers posed by human hunters in the forest. “ Bambi, a Life in the Woods, originally published in Austria as Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde is a 1923 Austrian novel written by Felix Salten and published by Ullstein Verlag.

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