Felix Salten

Felix Salten (born Sept. 6, 1869, Budapest, Hungary—died Oct. 8, 1945, Zürich, Switzerland) was an Austrian novelist and journalist, author of the children’s classic and adult allegory Bambi, a sensitively told subjective story of the life of a wild deer.

As a self-taught young writer he was befriended by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, and Hermann Bahr. A journalist at 18, he became an influential theater critic. He lived in Vienna until, as a Jew, he was forced to flee in 1939; he then settled in Switzerland.

Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde (1923; Bambi: A Life in the Woods), the book that brought him international fame, is a realistic, although anthropomorphized, account of a deer from his birth to his final role as a wise and tough old denizen of the forest, struggling with dignity to survive against his chief enemy, man the hunter. The close parallel between the fawn becoming a stag and a human child becoming an adult gives the book its moral overtone. In 1942 Disney released its animated film, Bambi, based on this book. In 1934 Salten published another popular children’s book, Florian, the Emperor’s Stallion, the tale of a proud Lipizzaner horse who is reduced to pulling a cab after World War I.

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