Bambi: A Life in the Woods

The novel that inspired the famous Disney movie is a much deeper work of art--a fable of loss and survival set against a beautifully evoked natural world.

This gripping tale of forest life has come to be thought of as a children’s story, thanks to the Disney adapation, but while young readers can enjoy it, it is also a moving contribution to the literature of the natural world. The fawn Bambi, first with his mother and then without her, learns that life in the forest is both precious and precarious. After losing his mother, he grows to become a young stag, falls in love with a doe, and is taught important lessons about the perilous ways of humans by the Old Prince, the oldest and largest stag in the forest. The last lesson Old Prince reveals to Bambi is that humans are not as all-powerful and wise as they seem, for they are also a mortal danger to each other.

Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

FELIX SALTEN (1869-1945) was an Austrian novelist, journalist, critic, essayist, and playwright. After Hitler banned his books in 1936, Salten, who was Jewish, moved to Switzerland, where he died in 1945. Bambi, written in 1923 and translated into English in 1928, is his most famous work.

KURT WIESE (1887-1974) was a German-born book illustrator, who wrote and illustrated twenty children’s books and illustrated another three hundred for other authors. He moved to the United States in 1927, and his first big success was with the illustrations for the English translation of Felix Salten’s Bambi.