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Mindy Aloff

Mindy Aloff is a prize-winning essayist, dance critic, and scholar. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, the New Republic, the Jewish Daily Forward, and many other periodicals. A former fellow of the Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson foundations, she is a member of the Dance faculty at Barnard College. (Drawing by Jorge Vargas)

Author

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney’s Classic Animated Film, by J. B. Kaufman. Weldon Owen, 256p. Hardback, $35.

Disney’s Snow White at 75

Winter 2013 | Criticism

When Disney’s Snow White was given its theatrical première, at the Carthay Circle Theatre, in Los Angeles, on December 21, 1937, the capacity house of 1,500 seats was filled by the likes of Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor, and Charlie Chaplin. Disney at that time was considered by prestigious cultural critics to be turning out, by way of cartoons, some of the most avant-garde art in America.

The Kerouac Voice

Fall 2012 | Criticism

Once upon a time in America, five dollars would buy enough gas to drive from Tucson, Arizona, to California. This was during the postwar 1940s, when Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady were making the cross-country road trips, at speeds over a hundred miles an hour, that would provide Kerouac with the material for his classic Beat novel, On the Road.