Daniel P. Mannix

Daniel Pratt Mannix IV (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 27, 1911 – Malvern, Pennsylvania, January 29, 1997) was an American author, journalist, photographer, sideshow performer, stage magician, animal trainer, and filmmaker. His best-known works are the 1958 book Those About to Die, which remained in continuous print for three decades, and the 1967 novel The Fox and the Hound which in 1981 was adapted into an animated film by Walt Disney Productions.

The Mannix family had a long history of service in the United States Navy, and Mannix' father, Daniel P. Mannix, III, was an American naval officer. His mother would often join her husband on his postings, and the Mannix children would stay at their grandparents' farm outside Philadelphia. It was there that Mannix began to keep and raise various wild animals. In time, the cost of feeding them led him to write his first book, The Back-Yard Zoo. Following family tradition, Mannix enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy in 1930, but left the next year, moving to the University of Pennsylvania and earning a degree in journalism instead of zoology.

Mannix served as a naval lieutenant with the Photo-Science Laboratory in Washington, D.C. during World War II. His varied career included time spent as a sword swallower and fire eater in a traveling carnival sideshow, where he performed under the stage name The Great Zadma. His magazine articles about these experiences, co-written with his wife Jule Junker Mannix, proved very popular and were reprinted several times in 1944 and 1945, and later expanded into book form in his 1951 account of carnival life Step Right Up, which in turn was reprinted in 1964 as Memoirs of a Sword Swallower. He was also at times a professional hunter, a collector of wildlife for zoos and circuses, and a bird trainer. The latter skill was showcased in the 1956 short film Universal Color Parade: Parrot Jungle, in which he is credited as the writer, actor, director, producer, photographer, and bird trainer.

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