Salten was born Siegmund Salzmann on 6 September 1869 in Pest, Austria-Hungary. His father was Fülöp Salzmann, the telegraph office's clerk in Pest; his mother was Maria Singer.[1] He was the grandson of an Orthodoxrabbi. When he was four weeks old, his family relocated to Vienna, as many Jews did after the Imperial government had granted full citizenship rights to Jews in 1867.[citation needed]
As a teen, Felix changed his name to Salten in order to appear less Jewish, and considered converting to Catholicism due to the antisemitism he experienced from his Austrian neighbors and schoolmates.[2] When his father went bankrupt, the sixteen-year-old Salten quit school and began working for an insurance agency.[citation needed]
Salten then became part of the "Young Vienna" movement (Jung-Wien) and soon received work as a full-time art and theater critic for Vienna's press (Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, Zeit). In 1900, he published his first collection of short stories. In 1901, he initiated Vienna's first, short-lived literary cabaret Jung-Wiener Theater Zum lieben Augustin.
He was soon publishing, on an average, one book a year, of plays, short stories, novels, travel books, and essay collections. He also wrote for nearly all the major newspapers of Vienna. In 1906, Salten went to Ullstein as an editor in chief of the B.Z. am Mittag and the Berliner Morgenpost, but relocated to Vienna some months later. He wrote also film scripts and librettos for operettas. In 1927 he became president of the Austrian P.E.N. club as successor of Arthur Schnitzler.
His best remembered work is Bambi (1923). A translation in English was published by Simon & Schuster in 1928, and became a Book-of-the-Month Club success. In 1933, he sold the film rights to the American director Sidney Franklin for only $1,000, and Franklin later transferred the rights to the Walt Disney Studios, which formed the basis of the animated film Bambi (1942).
Inspired by fellow Austrian Jew Theodor Herzl, Salten became an outspoken advocate for the Zionist movement, which appealed to Salten's sense of self-empowerment. Salten anonymously wrote a column for Herzl's newspaper Die Welt published a lengthy profile of Herzl after his 1904 death, and spoke at events sponsored by the Bar Kochba Society alongside Martin Buber.[2]
1906 – Josephine Mutzenbacher, authorship assumed – in German: Josefine Mutzenbacher oder Die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt (Vienna: Privatdruck [Fritz Freund], 1906)
1907 – Herr Wenzel auf Rehberg und sein Knecht Kaspar Dinckel
1927 – Martin Overbeck: Der Roman eines reichen jungen Mannes
1929 – Fünfzehn Hasen: Schicksale in Wald und Feld; English transl. Whittaker Chambers, as Fifteen Rabbits (US: Simon & Schuster, 1930, OCLC1050794154); revised and enlarged (New York : Grosset & Dunlap, 1942, illus. Kurt Wiese), OCLC4026552)
1931 – Freunde aus aller Welt: Roman eines zoologischen Gartens; English transl. Whittaker Chambers, illus. Kurt Wiese, as The City Jungle (US: Simon & Schuster, 1932, OCLC2079025)
