Neal Gabler

A portrait of the private life and public career of Walt Disney ranges from his deprived youth, to his contributions to the art of animation, to his visionary creation of the first synergistic entertainment empire, to his reclusive and lonely private world.

The Triumph of the American Imagination

Walt Disney

Taryn

As Robert Hughes put it, “[H]is achievement became a large shift in the limits of unreality.”

But if one source of Disney's magic was his ability to mediate between past and future, tradition and iconoclasm, the rural and the urban, the individual and the community, even between conservatism and liberalism, the most powerful source of his appeal as well as his greatest legacy may be that Walt Disney, more than any other American artist, defined the terms of wish fulfllment and demonstrated on a grand scale to his fellow Americans, and ultimately to the entire world, how one could be empowered by fantasy - how one could learn, in effect, to live within one's own illusions and even to transform the world into those illusions. "When You Wish Upon a Star," the song Disney borrowed from Pinocchio for his television theme, was his anthem and guiding principle. The key to his success was, as the journalist Adela Rogers St. John put it, that he "makes dreams come,” or at least gave the impression he did, and that he had “remolded a world not only nearer to his heart’s desire, but to yours and mine.” In numerous ways Disney struck what may be the very fundament of entertainment: the promise of a perfect world that conforms to our wishes. 

Walt about how the paper route he did as a child ‘helped forge his character’. He delivered papers for six years, every day, only missed five weeks. 

And most of the money went to his dad. Basically to support the family, pay for the house. Crazy. 

“developed an appreciation of what spare time I did have and used it to great advantage in my hobbies.”

Walt Disney quotes

Join the club