Kelly was natural inside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Spell however the kid, his personal moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut where his father worked in the munitions plant. Fallowing graduating from either Warren Harding High School within 1930, Kelly worked two or three odd jobs until landing the position as a crime newsperson on the Bridgeport Post. There he took higher cartooning & illustrated the life history of Bridgeport native P. T. Barnum. He discovered the job at Walt Disney Productions in California as an animator on Donald Duck cartoons. Kelly worked 1935 to 1941 for Disney, contributing to films including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, and Dumbo. When you took 1935 & 1936, his function as well appeared within early comedian books for what late became DC Comics. Kelly was one of numerous Disney animators, including Art Babbitt, Bill Tytla, and John Hubley, who picketed Disney in a period of the 1941 Disney animators' strike, after which he left a studio.

Kelly's best known character, Pogo, first saw print witharound 1943 in Dell's Animal Comics. When you took Globe War II, Kelly worked in the Army's Foreign Language Unit illustrating manuals. He returned to journalism when as a political cartoonist when a war, & within 1948, spell art director of the New York Star, Kelly began to produce the pen-&-ink strip of todays-cases comment populated by characters from either Okefenokee Swamp. A 1st Pogo strip appeared in October 4, 1948.

Pogo was a landmark strip within numbers of ways & Kelly is arguably one of the greatest & virtually all influential of cartoonists in the history of the craft. Kelly combined masterful line & brush-act (learned at a "mouse factory", we.e. Disney) by owning fluent & extremely-amusing story-telling acted out by an lovely cast of "nature's screechers". He borrowed from either various dialectic sources & his have fertile imagination to invent the unique & charming backwoods-patois, heavily on the nonsense, to healthy his cartoon swamp. Although "Pogo" stands in its have as a superbly-realised cartoon strip for the ages, it was maybe Kelly's interjection of political & social irony into a function that was its greatest pioneering accomplishment- such comment was only non waste the genre of dailies within Kelly's period.

A chief characters were Pogo the Possum; Albert the Alligator; Churchy LaFemme (cf. Cherchez la femme), a turtle; Howland Owl; Houndog; and Miss Mamzelle Hepzibah, the French skunk. Kelly utilized a strip inside a portion as a vehicle for his liberal & humanitarian political & social views & satirized, among more items, Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist demagogy & a sectarian & dogmatical behavior of Communists.

Around 1952 and later, the "Pogo for President" campaign, sustaining followers wearing "I Go Pogo" buttons, became an expression of political protest. "Pogo" wequally besides distinguished by exceptional linguistic cleverness & playfulness, as expressed, e.g., in the Pogo version of songs like "Deck Us All with Boston Charlie" (for "Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly") & "Ma Booney lice soda devotion" (for "My Bonnie lies over the ocean").

Perchance a best known quotation to are from either this series is, "We have met the enemy and he is us." A earliest form of this expression appeared around his introduction to The Pogo Papers (1953); it wwhen used tremendously late in the comic strip & as the title of a collection of strips. This is average of the wry & politically sharp comment to exist as obtained in the daily & Sunday strip. It was distributed by King Features Syndicate to hundreds of newspapers for numbers of years. A single strips were collected into at least twenty books, a few reprinted editions remain available now.

Walt Kelly illustrated the delicious kids's book titled A Clod on the evolution of human written by John O'Reilly & published inside 1952. A characters & animals in the book have a distinctly Pogoian character.

There was potentially the claymation movie featuring the caper of people swamp animals.

inside his passing around 1973 in Woodland Hills, California, Walt Kelly was interred in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn, New York.