Bambi's Dark Secret

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Book Patrol reveals it!

From the story...

Walt Disney may turn in his grave or thaw and drop deader if and when he learns that Bambi, the book he adapted to create the animation classic, was written by a man who is solidly credited as being the anonymous author of a celebrated and notorious work of German erotica.

In 1906, an erotic memoir was privately published. Purportedly written by a Viennese prostitute at the end of her life, Josefine Mutzenbacher, oder Die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne, it became a popular success; it is now a very rare book, a first edition copy recently selling for over $6,000. The introduction to the original is signed by "the editor." The "editor" was, in fact, the anonymous author. That author has been firmly identified as Felix Salten (pseud. of Siegmund Saltzmann), whose claim to fame is as the author of Bambi, Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde, originally published in 1923. The english translation of the story about a male roe deer (yes, Bambi is a boy) was rendered by Whittaker Chambers, the writer and former Communist Party member who gained fame for his testimony against Alger Hiss, and published in 1928 as Bambi, A Life in the Woods.