Jack Zipes is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Minnesota and has previously held professorships at New York University, the University of Munich, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Florida. In addition to his scholarly work, he is an active storyteller in public schools and has worked with children's theaters in France, Germany, Canada, and the United States. In 1997, he founded a storytelling and creative drama program, Neighborhood Bridges, in collaboration with the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis that is still thriving in the elementary schools of the Twin Cities. Regarded as a major American translator, he has published The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1987), Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales (1989), The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse (1995), and he has also edited Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture (1991), The Outspoken Princess and the Gentle Knight (1994), The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (2000), and Buried Treasures: The Political Power of Fairy Tales (2023).

Introduction; Chapter 1 Of Cats and Men; Chapter 2 The Rationalization of Abandonment and Abuse in Fairy Tales; Chapter 3 Toward a Theory of the Fairy-Tale Film; Chapter 4 Once Upon a Time beyond Disney; Chapter 5 Lion Kings and the Culture Industry; Chapter 6 Revisiting Benjamin's "The Storyteller";