[ noun ] a dwarf in one of the fairy stories of the brothers Grimm; tells a woman he will not hold her to a promise if she can guess his name and when she discovers it he is so furious that he destroys himself <noun.person>
Jeremy Rifkin, the Rumpelstiltskin of American science, is jumping up and down, screaming and petitioning federal agencies.
It was a production of "Rumpelstiltskin" at the San Francisco Actors Workshop, a group started by her father, Jules Irving, in 1954.