While at Simon & Schuster, he started the translation career of Whittaker Chambers by having him translate "Bambi" from German: My college friend, Clifton Fadiman, was then 1927–1928 a reader at Simon and Schuster, the New York book publishers. He offered to let me try my hand at translating a little German book. It was about a deer named Bambi and was written by an Austrian, of whom I had never heard, named Felix Salten... Bambi was an instant success, and I suddenly found myself an established translator. In 1932, Fadiman wrote "How I Came to Communism: Symposium" for the "New Masses" (shortly after Chambers left the magazine to begin his Underground career), in which he wrote: "History–mainly in the form of the crisis–became my teacher while I was still young enough to learn."