6.8 /10 1 Votes
Language English Originally published 1968 Genre Biography Country United States of America | 3.4/5 Goodreads Publication date 1968 Publisher Simon & Schuster | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (Hardcover, Paperback) Similar Richard Schickel books, Biographies | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney is a 1968 book by Richard Schickel. It is a biography of the life of Walt Disney. One of the first objective books about Disney, it takes a harshly critical view of much of his work — so much so that the Disney studio, apparently offended by it, refused to allow any photographs of Disney or production stills from his work to be used in the book.
In his 1982 book The Hollywood Musical, critic and author Ethan Mordden wrote that Schickel's "resentment of Disney's wealth and power" stood out "like a soapbox nut's exhortation — horror of horrors, the man was a capitalist."
However, Stephen J. Whitfield of Brandeis University wrote that the book was "One of the best studies ever done on American popular culture ... unfailingly, consistently intelligent, and eminently readable". Pauline Kael described it as "a revealing part of American cultural history."