Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl

Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1954
Born:	13 September 1916 Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales
Died:	23 November 1990, age 74 Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, England
Occupation(s):	Novelist, short story writer
Literary genre:	Children
Magnum opus:	Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, others
Website:	http://www.roalddahl.com/

Roald Dahl (13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British novelist, short story author, and screenwriter famous as a writer for both children and adults.

His most popular books for children included Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and The Witches, all of which were adapted into very succesful major motion pictures. His output for adults consisted primarily of short stories, most famous of which was "The Smoker".

Biography

Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales in 1916, to Norwegian parents, Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl née Hesselberg. Roald was named after the polar explorer Roald Amundsen, a national hero in Norway at the time. Dahl and his sisters were christened at the Norwegian sailors' church in Cardiff, where their parents worshipped.

In 1920, when Roald was three, his seven-year-old sister, Astri, died from appendicitis. About a month later, his father died of pneumonia at the age of 57. Despite these tragedies, Dahl's mother made the decision not to return to Norway to live with her relatives, but to remain in the UK, as it had been the wish of her husband's to have their children educated in British schools.

Roald first attended Llandaff Cathedral School. Many of the author's early antics and life experiences from his years at Llandaff are depicted in the autobiographical work, Boy: Tales of Childhood. This includes the "Great Mouse Plot of 1923", the story of how Roald, at the age of eight, along with four of his friends were caned by the headmaster after putting a dead mouse in a jar of sweets at the local sweet shop. Such scenarios were typical of Dahl's relatively harmless but mischievous nature, in both his work and in his life.

Thereafter, he was sent to several boarding schools in England including St Peter's in Weston-super-Mare. His time at St Peter's was an unpleasant experience for the young boy, though he was able to escape during summer holidays with his family on trips to his parent's native Norway. When at school, though, he was very homesick and wrote to his mother frequently, never revealing to her his despondency lest it cause her to worry. Only when she died did he find out she had saved every single one of his letters, in small bundles held together with green tape.

Roald grew very tall in his adolescence, reaching 6'6" (1.98m) as a young adult. Popular with peers and talented at sports, he was elected captain of the school's Fives and Squash teams, and also played well for the football team. He also developed an interest in photography during these years. Signs of Roald's unique imagination appeared as a teenager in England. One such example is when the Cadbury chocolate company sent boxes of new products to the school to be tested by the pupils. Dahl apparently would dream of inventing a new chocolate bar that would win the praise of Mr. Cadbury himself, a memory that would later serve as the inspiration for the author's third children's title, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

After finishing his schooling, Dahl spent three weeks hiking through Newfoundland with a group called the Public Schools' Exploring Society (now known as BSES Expeditions) before joining the Shell Petroleum Company in July of 1934. Following two years of training in the UK, he was transferred to Dar-es-Salaam, Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Along with the only two other Shell employees in the entire territory, he lived in luxury in the Shell House outside Dar-es-Salaam, with a cook and personal servants on premises. While on the job, supplying oil to customers across Tanganyika, he enjoyed his encounters black mambas and lions, and other wildlife.

World War II

In August 1939, as World War II became imminent, plans were made to round up the hundreds of Germans in Dar-es-Salaam. Dahl was made an officer in the King's African Rifles, commanding a platoon of askaris. Dahl was uncomfortable about having to detain hundreds of German nationals, but managed to complete his mission successfully.

Soon after this, in November 1939, he joined the Royal Air Force. He was accepted for flight training with 20 other men, 17 of whom would ultimately die in air combat. With only seven hours and 40 minutes experience in a De Havilland Tiger Moth he was cleared to fly solo. He continued on to advanced flying training in Iraq, 50 miles west of Baghdad at RAF Habbaniya. Following six months training flying Hawker Harts, Dahl earned his wings as a Pilot Officer.

He was assigned to No. 80 Squadron RAF, flying Gloster Gladiators, the last biplane fighter plane used by the RAF. Dahl was surprised to find that he would not receive any specialized training in aerial combat, or the particulars of flying a Gladiator. On 19 September 1940, en route to Mersa Matruh from Abu Sueir in Egypt, Dahl, in an attempt to land on a desert airstrip at night, crashed into a boulder, fracturing his skull, rendering him blind. Later, it was found through an RAF inquiry into the crash that the location he had been ordered to fly to was incorrect, and he had mistakenly been sent instead to the no man's land between the Allied and Italian forces.

Dahl was rescued and taken to a first-aid post in Mersa Matruh, where he regained consciousness, but not his sight. He was then taken by train to the Royal Navy hospital in Alexandria where he eventually regained his sight. Despite doctors saying that he had no chance of flying again, Dahl was discharged in February 1941, five months after he was admitted to the hospital, and cleared to return to his flying duties.

He joined the Greek campaign based near Athens, flying now a Hawker Hurricane. Here, Dahl saw his first aerial combat on April 15th, while flying alone over the city of Chalcis. He attacked six Junkers Ju-88s that were bombing ships, managing to shoot one down. Then, on April 20th, Dahl took part in the "Battle of Athens," alongside the highest-scoring British Commonwealth ace of World War II, Pat Pattle and Dahl's friend David Coke. Dahl survived the day, despite five Hurricanes being shot down and four of their pilots killed, including Pattle.

With the Germans were pressing hard on Athens, Dahl's squadron was evacuated to Egypt before reassembling in Haifa. From here, Dahl flew missions every day for a period of four weeks, until he began to get severe headaches that caused him to frequently black out. Dahl, by this point a Flight Lieutenant, was invalided home to Britain. The year was 1942.

Dahl was transferred to Washington as Assistant Air Attaché and it was there that he began to write. His first published work, in the August 1, 1942 issue of the Saturday Evening Post was "Shot Down Over Libya," describing the crash of his Gloster Gladiator. C. S. Forester had asked Dahl to write down some RAF anecdotes so that he could shape them into a story. After Forester sat down to read what Dahl had given him, he decided to publish it exactly as it was. The original title of the article was A Piece of Cake — the title was changed to sound more dramatic, despite the fact that the he was not "shot down."

During the war, Forester worked for the British Information Service and was writing propaganda for the Allied cause, mainly for American consumption. This work introduced Dahl to espionage and the activities of the Canadian spymaster William Stephenson, known by the codename "Intrepid." During the war, Dahl supplied intelligence from Washington to Stephenson and his organization, which was known as British Security Coordination. Dahl was sent back to Britain, for supposed misconduct by British Embassy officials.

He ended the war as a Wing Commander, with a record of five aerial victories confirmed by post-war research and cross-referenced in Axis records.

Family Life and Writing Career

Dahl was known during the latter time of his service for the wild yarns he would spin about his adventures overseas. One such yarn he put to paper, titled "Gremlin Lore", which was about the mythical creatures that sabotaged RAF planes. Since he was a serving officer at the time he wrote the story, Dahl was required to submit everything he wrote for approval. The officer who read it decided to pass it along to his good friend Walt Disney, who was looking for war–related ideas for his fledgling film company. Disney liked Dahl's story but was unable to make a picture of it due to copyright issues. However, he did create a picture book from it entitled Walt Disney: The Gremlins (A Royal Air Force Story by Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl). These days, the book is now extremely rare and considered a treasure by Dahl collectors, as it was the author's first book.

By the Fall of 1944, Dahl had a literary agent, Ann Watkins, and a number of stories published in American magazines, including Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and Ladies Home Journal. Two of these stories, Gremlins and Katina, were written for children.

In 1945 Dahl moved back home to Amersham, England to be near his mother. He spent the next year living simply amongst the residents of the small village, some of whom would later be immortalized as character's in Roald's works, such as Claud Taylor from the Claud's Dog series. In 1946 Reynal and Hitchcock published Over to You, a collection of Dahl's war stories. The book received mixed reviews but was successful enough to inspire Dahl's next major effort at writing: Sometime Never (1948), a novel about the possibilities of nuclear war. Though the book was a major flop, it is noted as the first published piece of fiction in the U.S. to depict nuclear catastrophe since the bombing of Hiroshima.

In the years following, Dahl reunited with his American friend and mentor Charles Marsh, helping the newspaper man amass a valuable collection of British art and antiques. Dahl also helped Marsh set up a charity known as the Marsh's Public Welfare Foundation. In return, Marsh set up a trust in Dahl's name and invested thousands of dollars into Dahl's family forestry operation in Norway.

Though these years in England were enjoyable for Dahl, he began to miss the excitement of America, particularly New York. As the 1950's began, Dahl began to earn some money from stories sold to Collier's and The New Yorker, and so he made the move to the Big Apple, settling in with the Marsh family in their Manhattan apartment. He soon found himself a part of the circuit of celebrity parties, and it was in 1951 at a party thrown by playwright Lillian Hellman, that he met the actress Patricia Neal. Neal, like many of the New York elite, was charmed by Dahl's wit and clever sarcasm

He was married from 1953 to 1983 to the Academy Award winning American actress Patricia Neal. They had five children together: Olivia (died of measles encephalitis, aged seven), Tessa, Theo, Ophelia, and Lucy.

When he was four months old, Dahl's son Theo was severely injured when his baby carriage was hit by a taxi in New York City. For a time he suffered from hydrocephalus: as a result his father became involved in the development of what became known as the "Wade-Dahl-Till" (or WDT) valve, a device to alleviate the condition.

In 1965, Patricia Neal suffered three cerebral aneurysms while pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy. Roald took control of her rehabilitation and she eventually relearned to talk and walk. The marriage however became turbulent from there and the couple divorced in 1983. Roald then married Felicity ("Liccy") d'Abreu Crosland, who was Neal's best friend at the time. The two remained married until the author's death.

Ophelia Dahl is director and co-founder (with doctor Paul Farmer) of Partners in Health, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing health care to some of the most impoverished communities in the world. Lucy Dahl, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles. Tessa's daughter (who was the inspiration for Sophie, the main character in her grandfather's book The BFG) is model and author Sophie Dahl who remembers him as "a very difficult man – very strong, very dominant ... not unlike the father of the Mitford sisters sort of roaring round the house with these very loud opinions, banning certain types – foppish boys, you know – from coming round."

Anti-Semitism

Dahl has been subject to calls for boycotts in Israel and elsewhere because of his alleged (and eventually admitted) anti-Semitism.

In the summer of 1983, he wrote a book review for the Literary Review of God Cried by Newsweek writer Tony Clifton, a polemical picture book about the invasion of Lebanon by Israel. Dahl's review stated that the Israeli attack on Lebanon in June 1982 was when "we all started hating Israel," and that the book would make readers "violently anti-Israeli." According to biographer Jeremy Treglown, Dahl had originally written "when we all started hating Jews" - but editor Gillian Greenwood of the Literary Review changed Dahl's terms from "Jews" and "Jewish" to "Israel" and "Israeli."

On the basis of the published version, Dahl would later claim, "I am not anti-Semitic. I am anti-Israel."Dahl believed that his review kept him from being knighted, which was reportedly an ambition of his. Perhaps due to his hopes for a knighthood, in 1986 Dahl had turned down the award of an OBE, according to government papers which were leaked in 2003.

According to at least two biographers, when defending his review he told a journalist that same year: "There's a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity . . . I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason." Nonetheless, according to Treglown, Dahl maintained friendships with a handful of individual Jews.

In later years, Dahl occasionally tried to downplay some of the accusations of anti-Semitism with a sympathetic episode about German-Jewish refugees in his book Going Solo, and a separate claim that he was opposed to injustice, not Jews. He never retreated from his strong stance against Israel, however, and shortly before his death in 1990 he told the British newspaper The Independent "I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become anti-Semitic."

Death and legacy

Roald Dahl died of a rare blood disease, myelodysplastic anaemia, on 23 November 1990, at his home, Gipsy House, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, at the age of 74, and was buried in the cemetery at the parish church of St Peter and St Paul. According to his granddaughter, the family gave him a "sort of Viking funeral. He was buried with his snooker cues, some very good burgundy, chocolates, HB pencils and a power saw." In his honour, the Roald Dahl Children's Gallery was opened at Buckinghamshire County Museum in nearby Aylesbury.

In 2002 one of Cardiff's modern landmarks, the historic Oval Basin plaza, was re-christened "Roald Dahl Plass." "Plass" means plaza in Norwegian, a nod to the acclaimed late writer's Norwegian roots. There have also been calls from the public for a permanent statue of him to be erected in the city.

Dahl's charitable commitments in the fields of neurology, haematology and literacy have been continued by his widow since his death, through the Roald Dahl Foundation. In June 2005, the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre opened in Great Missenden to celebrate the work of Roald Dahl and advance his work in literacy.

Writing

Inspired by a meeting with C. S. Forester, Dahl's first published work was Shot Down Over Libya (today the story is published as "A Piece of Cake"), a story about his wartime adventures, which was bought by the Saturday Evening Post for $900 and propelled him into a career as a writer. Its title was inspired by a highly erroneous and sensationalized article about the crash that blinded him, which claimed he had been shot down instead of simply forced to land by low fuel.

His first children's book was The Gremlins, about mischievous little creatures that were part of RAF folklore. The book was commissioned by Walt Disney for a film that was never made, and published in 1943. Dahl went on to create some of the best-loved children's stories of the 20th century, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach.

He also had a successful parallel career as the writer of macabre adult short stories, usually with a dark sense of humour and a surprise ending. Many were originally written for American magazines such as Ladies Home Journal, Harper's, Playboy and The New Yorker, then subsequently collected by Dahl into anthologies, gaining world-wide acclaim for the author. Dahl wrote more than 60 short stories and they have appeared in numerous collections, some only being published in book form after his death. See List of Roald Dahl short stories. His stories also brought him three Edgar Awards: in 1954, for the collection Someone Like You; 1959, for the story The Landlady; and 1980, for the episode of Tales of the Unexpected based on "Skin."

One of his more famous adult stories, The Smoker (also known as Man from the South), was filmed as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and also adapted into Quentin Tarantino's segment of the 1995 film Four Rooms. His short story collection Tales of the Unexpected was adapted to a successful TV series of the same name. A number of his short stories are supposed to be extracts from the diary of his (fictional) Uncle Oswald, a rich gentleman whose sexual exploits form the subject of these stories.

For a brief, relatively unsuccessful period in the 1960s, Dahl wrote screenplays. Two of his screenplays – the James Bond film You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – were adaptations of novels by Ian Fleming. Dahl also wrote an initial draft adapting his own novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was heavily rewritten by David Seltzer, and produced as the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). Dahl later disowned the film.

Memories with Food at Gipsy House, written with his wife Felicity and published posthumously in 1991, was a mixture of recipes, family reminiscences and Dahl's musings on favourite subjects such as chocolate, onions, and claret.

Many of his children's books are illustrated by Quentin Blake.

Children's fiction

Dahl's works for children are usually told from the point of view of a child, typically involve adult villainesses, who hate and mistreat children, and feature at least one "good" adult to counteract the villain(s) (perhaps a reference to the abuse that Dahl himself experienced in the boarding schools he attended). They usually contain a lot of black humour and grotesque scenarios, including gruesome violence. The Witches and Matilda are two examples of this formula. The BFG follows it in a more analogical way with the good giant (the BFG or "Big Friendly Giant") representing the "good adult" archetype and the other giants being the "bad adults." This formula is also somewhat evident in Dahl's film script for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Class-conscious themes – ranging from the thinly veiled to the blatant – also surface in works such as Fantastic Mr Fox and Danny, the Champion of the World. Dahl also features in his books characters that are very fat, usually children. Augustus Gloop, Bruce Bogtrotter, and Bruno Jenkins are a few of these characters, although an enormous woman named Aunt Sponge is featured in James and The Giant Peach.

Dahl's mother used to tell him and his sisters tales about trolls and other mythical Norwegian creatures and some of his children's books contain references or elements inspired by these stories, such as the giants in The BFG.

List of works

Children's writing

Children's stories

• The Gremlins (1943)
• James and the Giant Peach (1961) — Film: James and the Giant Peach (live-action/animated) (1996)
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) — Films: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
• The Magic Finger (1966)
• Fantastic Mr Fox (1970) — Film: Fantastic Mr. Fox (animated) (2008)
• Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1973) A sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
• Danny the Champion of the World (1975) — Film: Danny the Champion of the World (TV movie) (1989)
• Going Solo (1986)
• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (1977)
• The Enormous Crocodile (1978)
• The Twits (1980)
• George's Marvelous Medicine (1981)
• The BFG (1982) — Film: The BFG (animated) (1989)
• The Witches (1983) — Film: The Witches (1990)
• The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (1985)
• Matilda (1988) — Film: Matilda (1996)
• Esio Trot (1989)
• The Minpins (1991)
• The Vicar of Nibbleswicke (1991)

Children's poetry

• Revolting Rhymes (1982)
• Dirty Beasts (1983)
• Rhyme Stew (1989)

Adult fiction

Novels

• Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen (1948)
• My Uncle Oswald (1979)

Short story collections

• Over To You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying (1946)
• Someone Like You (1953)
• Kiss Kiss (1960)
• Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl (1969)
• Tales of the Unexpected (1979)
• Switch Bitch (1974) ISBN 0 1400 4179 6
• More Tales of the Unexpected (1980)
• The Best of Roald Dahl (1978)
• Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories (1983). Edited with an introduction by Dahl.
• Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life: The Country Stories of Roald Dahl (1989)
• The Collected Short Stories of Dahl (1991)
• Two Fables (1986). "Princess and the Poacher" and "Princess Mammalia."
• The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1997). (Known in the USA as The Umbrella Man and Other Stories).
• The Mildenhall Treasure (2000)
• Roald Dahl: Collected Stories (2006)

See the alphabetical List of Roald Dahl short stories. See also Roald Dahl: Collected Stories for a complete, chronological listing.

Non-fiction

• Boy – Tales of Childhood (1984) Recollections up to the age of 16, looking particularly at schooling in Britain in the early part of the 20th century.
• Going Solo (1986) Continuation of his autobiography, in which he goes to work for Shell and spends some time working in Tanzania before joining the war effort and becoming one of the last Allied pilots to withdraw from Greece during the German invasion.
• Measles, a Dangerous Illness (1986)
• Memories with Food at Gipsy House (1991)
• Roald Dahl's Guide to Railway Safety (1991)
• My Year (1993)
• The Roald Dahl Ominibus (1993)

Plays

• The Honeys (1955.) Produced at the Longacre Theater on Broadway.

Film scripts

• 36 Hours (1965)
• You Only Live Twice (1967)
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)
• The Night Digger (1971)
• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)

Television

• Way Out (1961) Horror series produced by David Susskind

Template:Roald Dahl

Sources

• Philip Howard, "Dahl, Roald (1916–1990)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39827 accessed 24 May 2006

External links

• Official website
• Roald Dahl Books
• Roald Dahl Foundation website
• Roald Dahl Museum
• Fan website dedicated to Roald Dahl
• Roald Dahl, from Cardiff, Wales
• Roald Dahl at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Roald Dahl at the Internet Movie Database
• Roald Dahl at the Notable Names Database
• Roald Dahl at Findagrave.com
• Bibliography
• Radio interview with Dahl in Norwegian by NRK (1975)
• Roald Dahl Day
• A guide to finding sources and literature about Roald Dahl, by Kelly Harkrader

audio reading

• THE CANDY MAN Why children love Roald Dahl's stories - and many adults don't. by Margaret Talbot Publication © 2005 The New Yorker
• The Way Out television series

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