Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination »

Neal Gabler is the author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history. His biography Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity was named best nonfiction book of the year by Time. He appears regularly on the media review program Fox News Watch, and writes often for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He is currently a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society in the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California. He lives with his wife in Amagansett, New York.

The first full-scale, annotated biography of Walt Disney, from the Los Angeles Times Book Award-winning author of Winchell. Few personalities ever loom large enough in the cultural consciousness that their names alone immediately evoke an image, a set of values, even a way of regarding the world. To this day, Walt Disney bestrides our culture. He re-invented animation, re-imagined the amusement park, and reshaped the entertainment industry by building a synergistic empire the likes of which no one has ever seen. With these contributions, Walt Disney has left a deep ineradicable brand on our culture. In this truly definitive biography of both the man and his work, we learn in remarkably vivid detail exactly how he accomplished all of this.

The Washington Post - Michael Dirda

There's nothing Mickey Mouse about this terrific biography of Walt Disney (1900- 1966), arguably the most influential figure in 20th-century American culture. The research is astonishingly detailed, whether Neal Gabler is deconstructing complex business and financial alliances, revealing the shifting inner dynamics of the Disney studios or describing, in page after mesmerizing page, the creation of such cartoon landmarks as "Steamboat Willie," the Silly Symphonies, "The Three Little Pigs," "Fantasia" and "Pinocchio." There's an entire 60-page chapter just on "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), guiding the reader through the long gestation and realization of this masterpiece of animation, the very Chartres of cartoons.