William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, both through their own creativity and that of their studio, were second only to Walt Disney in the number of memorable, durable, and famous characters they introduced to the art of American animation. Known and loved throughout the world, the Hanna-Barbera cartoons differed from those of Disney in exclusively mining contemporary American life for their ideas, permeating the popular culture with images that reflected it in cartoon form. Their output was prodigious and many of their creations famous, but they will forever be synonymous with the world's most popular cat-and-mouse duo, Tom and Jerry, whose inspired an hilarious adversarial relationship, serviced over 100 cartoon shorts, and won Academy Awards for seven of them, of which Johann Mouse (1952) is perhaps the most outstanding of all.

Born in 1910 in Melrose, New Mexico, Hanna began his professional career at age 20, working as a story editor, lyricist, and...