He immigrated to Kentucky, the United States, around 1900, established a successful tile and terrazzo company, then returned to Italy to marry and start a family.

Rosa later switched the strip to comedy-adventure, his favorite style of comics, and drew the story Lost in (an alternative section of) the Andes.

(The title is a reference to Lost in the Andes!, a Donald Duck story by Carl Barks, first published in April 1949.)

Rosa authored and illustrated the monthly Information Center column in the fanzine Rocket's Blast Comicollector from 1974 to 1979.

This was a question-and-answer feature dealing with readers' queries on all forms of pop entertainment of which Rosa was a student, including comics, TV and movies.

This led to his creation of the comic strip character Captain Kentucky for the Saturday edition of the local newspaper Louisville Times.

Since early childhood Don Rosa had been fascinated by Carl Barks' stories about Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck.

He immediately called the editor, Byron Erickson, and told him that he was the only American who was born to write and draw one Scrooge McDuck adventure.

As Don Rosa explained it, he was just "(...) turning that old Pertwillaby Papers adventure back into the story it originally was in my head, starring Scrooge, Donald, the nephews, and Flintheart Glomgold."

In 1991 Rosa started creating The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck,[9] a 12 chapter story about his favorite character.

As an artist, he could not live under the conditions Egmont was offering him but he did not want to give up making Scrooge McDuck comics either.

Rosa had discovered too often that his stories were printed with incorrect pages of art, improper colors, poor lettering, or pixelated computer conversions of the illustrations.

Rosa, who had poor eyesight since childhood, experienced a severe retinal detachment in March 2008, which required emergency eye surgery.

In an interview at the Danish Komiks.dk fair on June 2, 2008, Rosa announced his decision not to continue creating comics due to various reasons such as his eye troubles, low pay, and the use of his stories by international Disney licensees in special hardback or album editions without payment of royalties or permission for the use of his name.

The essay, posted at career-end.donrosa.de, cites the above reasons, with special emphasis on the "Disney comics system" for paying writers and artists a flat per-page rate, and then allowing publishers around the world to print the stories without payment to the creators.

[17][18][19] Rosa also grows exotic chili plants and tends nearly 30 acres of a private nature preserve with wildflower fields and numerous forest trails.

Rosa has an especially large following in Finland, and in 1999, he created a special 32-page adventure featuring Scrooge McDuck for his Finnish fans called; Sammon Salaisuus (translates to The secret of the Sampo, but it is officially named The Quest for Kalevala[22] in English), based on the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala.

The publication of this story created a national sensation in Finland where Donald Duck and the Kalevala are important aspects of culture.

Because of being self-taught in making comics, Rosa relies mostly on the skills he learned in engineering school, which means using technical pens and templates extensively.

People tell me that my pencils look just like Barks, but my inks are pure Rosa, and I can't letter properly!

He has spent a lot of time in making lists of facts and anecdotes pointed out in different stories by his mentor.

Barks even claimed to have also created Huey, Dewey, and Louie while working as a writer on Donald Duck animated cartoons in 1937."

While Barks himself discouraged the use of extreme grimacing and gesturing in any other panel for comical or dramatic effect,[29] Rosa's stories are rich with exaggerated facial expressions and physical slapstick.

Due to Disney's refusal to allow artists to sign their work, early Rosa dedications to Barks were deleted as they seemed to be a form of a signature.

Rosa is only interested in creating stories featuring the Duck family, but he often hides small Mickey Mouse heads or figures in the pictures, sometimes in a humiliating or unwanted situation.

In the story Attack of the Hideous Space-Varmints, the asteroid with Uncle Scrooge's money bin on it crashes into the Moon along with two missiles, creating a large Mickey Mouse head on the surface.

In the second Rosa story featuring The Three Caballeros, Donald Duck is shocked by the sight of a capybara standing on its hind legs, with shrubs, leaves and fruit in front of its body, coincidentally making it look like Mickey Mouse.

In the original work, Louhi is depicted as bare-chested, but the Disneyfied version has been drawn a top, of fabric patterned with Mickey Mouse heads.

His work has won Rosa a great deal of recognition in the industry, including nominations for the Comics' Buyer's Guide Award for Favorite Writer in 1997, 1998, and 1999.

[33] While The Prisoner of White Agony Creek, Rosa's latest Duck story to-date, was published in 2006, he was also nominated for the 2007 Harvey Awards in five categories (more than any other creator was that year) for his Uncle Scrooge comics: "Best Writer", "Best Artist", "Best Cartoonist", "Best Cover Artist", and "Special Award for Humor in Comics.