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Michael Maltese was born on February 6, 1908 in New York City to Italian immigrant parents, Paul and Concetta. He was married to Florence Sass in 1936 and had a daughter, Brenda, in 1938.

He started his career in the cartoon business at the Max Fleischer Cartoon Studio in New York City in 1935 where he worked as a cel painter, assistant animator, and overtime camera man. To find employment in the lean years of the depression Maltese and his wife decided to move to Los Angeles. While waiting to hear about a job opportunity from Walt Disney, Maltese took a job with the Warner Brothers cartoon studio, where he stayed for the next twenty-one years. Maltese started as an in-betweener for Warner’s but was quickly moved to the story department. He worked for most of the directors, doing a number of cartoons with I. “Friz” Freleng and Fred “Tex” Avery; but his most memorable work was done with director Chuck Jones. From 1946-1958, Maltese worked exclusively with Jones, creating some of the most popular characters for Warner Brothers, including Pepe Le Pew, Road Runner and Coyote, and Yosemite Sam. He also wrote some of the most memorable Warner cartoons, such as The Rabbit of Seville, Duck Dodgers in the 24th ½ Century, One Froggy Evening, What’s Opera, Doc, and the Oscar-winning For Scentimental Reasons. He also wrote many of the songs that were used in his cartoons, including Michigan Rag from One Froggy Evening.

Maltese left Warner Brothers in 1958 to go to work for the fledgling Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Studio where he helped create such television series as The Flintstones, Huckleberry Hound and Quick-Draw McGraw as head of the story department. He retired in 1973 but continued to find work writing comic book stories for Gold Key Comics. He came out of retirement in 1979 to again work with Chuck Jones on a sequel to Duck Dodgers and a new Road-Runner cartoon.

Michael Maltese died in 1981 after a long illness.