Animation Mogul. He received notoriety in the 20th century as a successful animator, director and producer in the American cartoon industry. Born on Delancey Street in Little Italy within the Lower East Side section of Manhattan, New York City, New York, he was the son of Vincent Barbera and Francesca Calvacca. He displayed a talent for drawing as early as the first grade. While in high school, he won several boxing titles. He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1928. Soon afterward, he would marry his high school sweetheart Dorothy Earl, and the couple had three children before divorcing in 1963. He soon met and married Sheila Holden. He tried his hand at banking, playwriting and amateur boxing before the successful sale of a sketch to "Collier's Magazine" encouraged him to pursue a career as a cartoon artist. In 1936, he found work at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Cartoon Studios. In 1938, he joined forces with William Hanna. The two quickly realized they would make a good team. By 1939, they had solidified a partnership that would last over 60 years. Barbera and Hanna worked alongside animator Tex Avery, who had created the animated characters of Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny for Warner Bros. and directed Droopy cartoons at MGM. In 1940, Hanna and Barbera jointly directed "Puss Gets the Boot," which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject. Despite the success of their cartoon "Puss Gets the Boot," the studio did not want to produce more cat and mouse cartoons believing that there were already enough cartoons of those in existence. Surprised by the success of "Puss Gets the Boot," Barbera and Hanna ignored the resistance they faced and continued developing the cat-and-mouse themed cartoons, and eventually, their idea was accepted. The result was their most famous creation, "Tom and Jerry." Over the next 17 years, the occasionally sadistic antics that these two talented men devised for their anthropomorphic rivals, rechristened "Tom and Jerry". Though MGM put him and Hanna in charge of its animation division in 1955, the studio closed the unit two years later. In 1957, Hanna and Barbera co-founded Hanna-Barbera Studios, the most successful television animation studio in the business, which they sold ten years later for 12 million dollars. Their first TV series, "The Ruff & Reddy Show," had its debut on NBC in December of 1957. That was followed in 1958 by "The Huckleberry Hound Show," about a powder-blue pooch who spoke and sung badly with a Southern drawl. This series received in 1960 the first Emmy Award for an animated series. A successful spinoff series "The Yogi Bear Show" was yielded from a supporting character in "The Huckleberry Hound Show." Yogi Bear was an animated Ed Norton-like character from the television series "The Honeymooners." The two men revisited "The Honeymooners" in 1960 to create their most popular series, "The Flintstones," a half-hour animated sitcom about two families living in the Stone Age suburb of Bedrock. It appeared in prime-time television on ABC, ranking in the top-20 shows in its first year. By the late 1960s, Hanna-Barbera Productions was the most successful television animation studio in the business. "The Flintstones" has remained popular over the years and have spawned countless television specials and several feature films. After tackling the past, they jumped to the future with "The Jetsons" in 1962. In the late 1960s, Hanna-Barbera scored another big hit with "Scooby Doo, Where Are You?" Later, they also produced the critically acclaimed "Charlotte's Web" in 1973. Some of their later projects included "Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space" and "The Smurfs." In all, the pair is believed to have produced more than 3,000 half-hour shows and 150 television series according to the "Los Angeles Times." Besides being nominated for awards, the Hanna–Barbera team received seven Academy Awards and eight Emmy Awards, including one for Outstanding Achievement in Children's Programming in 1973 for "Last of the Curlews: The ABC Afterschool Special." The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave Hanna & Barbera the prestigious Governors Award in 1988. He would write an autobiography, "My Life in 'Toons: From Flatbush to Bedrock in Under a Century." He would die at the age of 95 in his Studio City home of natural causes.