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 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.

Early 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 Tony award-winning actress Patricia Neal. Neal, like many of the New York elite, was charmed by Dahl's wit and clever sarcasm. The two soon began to see each other on a regular basis.

Success and Family Life

Dahl was enjoying a number of commercial successes by 1953, including the stories "Taste," "My Lady Love, My Dove," "Skin," and "Dip in the Pool," as well as the collection Someone Like You', which consisted of four stories taken from Dahl's days in the English countryside just a few years prior. It was also in 1953 that Roald and Pat were married, on July 2nd at Trinity Church in New York.

The couple would go on to have five children together, and it is to them that Roald attributes his success as a children's book author. Though he had had success as a writer of adult fiction, it was through children's literature that he captured the world's heart. His first big success was with James and the Giant Peach in 1961 followed by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964.

Three tragedies struck the Dahl family in the 1960's. The first was in 1960 when the couple's only son was severly injured when a taxi drove into his baby carriage. 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. Then in 1963 their eldest child, Olivia, died from a sudden outbreak of measles at the age of 8. Finally, in 1965, Patricia suffered a series of near–fatal strokes caused by brain aneurisms during her pregnancy with the couple's youngest child, Lucy (who was nevertheless born healthy). She remained in a coma for 21 days though would eventually relearn to walk and speak. Largely credited with her rehabilitation was Roald who had committed himself to staying by her side, and even designed her recovery routine.

The 60's also saw a lot of success for the couple. Roald's career as an author was in full swing, and he wrote two screenplays for Hollywood, the James Bond flick, You Only Live Twice (1967) and the Dick Van Dyke-starring, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). Patricia's career was also on the up as she was acting steadily in one major production after the other, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1964 for the film Hud and receiving a nomination in the same category for her role in The Subject Was Roses (1968).

Latter Years, Death, and Legacy

Through the 70's, Patricia and Roald's continued steadily, though their marriage grew more and more turbulent. With their children grown and their lifestyles calming, the couple finally divorced in 1983 after thirty years of marriage. Dahl remarried in that same year Felicity ("Liccy") d'Abreu Crossland, who had been Patricia's best friend at the time.

The last years of Roald's life were relatively happy and productive, and some of his best books were written during this period: The BFG (1982), The Witches (1983), Boy (1984), and Matilda (1988). Roald Dahl died at the age of 74 from the rare blood disease, myelodysplastic anaemia, on November 23, 1990 at his home, Gipsy House, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. He was interred at the parish church of St Peter and St Paul, buried with his snooker cues, a bottle of 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.

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 (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 (2008)
• Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1973).
• Danny the Champion of the World (1975) — TV Movie: Danny the Champion of the World (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 (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).
• 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).
• The Mildenhall Treasure (2000)
• Roald Dahl: Collected Stories (2006)

Non-fiction

• Boy – Tales of Childhood (1984)
• Going Solo (1986)
• 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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