Roald Dahl

British short-story writer, novelist, screenwriter, and poet.

• Born: September 13, 1916
• Birthplace: Llandaff, Wales
• Died: November 23, 1990
• Place of death: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England

Biography

Roald Dahl i remarkable for having achieved wide acclaim in two distinct genres: macabre tales for adults and children’s literature. The son of Norwegian immigrants who found prosperity in Wales, his childhood was darkened by his father’s early death and his unhappy experiences at various English boarding schools. Rather than attend college, he went to work for Shell Oil. An assignment in Africa delighted him and provided materials for such stories as "Poison."

During World War II Dahl enlisted in the Royal Air Force (RAF), where he was a successful fighter pilot but suffered injuries that would plague him all his life. He was reassigned to the British Embassy in Washington, DC, to work as a spy. Here he met C. S. Forester, who wanted to do an article about Dahl’s experiences in the RAF. Dahl decided to write the article himself, however, and with Forester’s encouragement he sold several stories about pilots that he later collected in Over to You. A few of these stories, among them "An African Story," veer into the fantastic and allow a glimpse of the macabre sensibilities for which Dahl later became known. He also wrote a children’s story, The Gremlins, about mischievous critters sabotaging fighter planes, which Walt Disney purchased, though the film was never made.

After the war Dahl decided to try writing for a living. When his novel Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen received mixed reviews, he returned to writing short stories. In the eighteen stories of Someone Like You Dahl portrays a variety of characters who at first appear the very picture of English gentility, a veneer through which madness and cruelty eventually seep like acids. Among the frequently reprinted tales are "Lamb to Slaughter," in which a long-suffering housewife murders her husband and disposes of the murder weapon in an unusual way, and "Taste," "Man from the South," and "Dip in the Pool," about the disastrous wagers of obsessive gamblers. The theme of dangerous risk-taking recurs in many stories.

The stories in Kiss, Kiss, as its ironic title implies, focus on problematic relationships between men and women. "The Way up to Heaven," for example, portrays a woman with a pathological fear of being late, whose husband torments her by procrastinating whenever they have an appointment; when she realizes that he has intentionally become stuck in an elevator to delay her trip to the airport, she leaves him in it to die. In "William and Mary," a tyrannical husband’s brain and eye are kept alive by a scientist after his death; Mary takes her husband’s remains home so he can watch her revel in her new freedom. Both collections, which were compared with the works of Saki and John Collier, won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Dahl married the American actress Patricia Neal in 1953. Although their marriage was troubled from the start, their four children kept them together until 1983 (a fifth child died of measles in childhood, and their only son developed hydrocephalus after being hit by a car). When Neal suffered a stroke in 1965, Dahl bullied her back to health, an experience frequently romanticized by biographers.

When Dahl began writing for children, his stories found an enthusiastic reception. James and the Giant Peach was an instant success, and reception of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was even greater; Dahl participated in writing the screenplay for the movie adaptation, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Subsequent books—among them The Magic Finger, The Enormous Crocodile, and Matilda—were hugely popular, and The Witches won the Whitbread Award. Though Dahl’s young protagonists are frequently orphaned, he repeatedly shows family solidarity and love as powerful enough to carry the children through their fantastic adventures. Some reviewers thought that Dahl’s stories for children encourage disrespect for adults and depict too much cruelty and crude humor, but most critics judged them favorably, and the stories continue to be loved by young readers and adults alike. Dahl remains one of the best-selling authors of fiction of all time, and is routinely listed as among the greatest British writers of the twentieth century.

Author Works

Short Fiction:

Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying, 1946

Someone Like You, 1953

Kiss, Kiss, 1959

Twenty-six Kisses from Roald Dahl, 1960

Twenty-nine Kisses, 1969

Selected Stories, 1970

Switch Bitch, 1974

Tales of the Unexpected, 1977

The Best of Roald Dahl, 1978

Taste and Other Tales, 1979

More Tales of the Unexpected, 1980

A Roald Dahl Selection: Nine Short Stories, 1980

Two Fables, 1986

Completely Unexpected Tales, 1986

A Second Roald Dahl Selection: Eight Short Stories, 1987

Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life, 1989

The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl, 1991

The Roald Dahl Treasury, 1997

Long Fiction:

Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen, 1948

My Uncle Oswald, 1979

Drama:

The Honeys, pr. 1955

Screenplays:

You Only Live Twice, 1967 (with Harry Jack Bloom)

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 1968 (with Ken Hughes)

The Night Digger, 1971

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, 1971

Nonfiction:

Boy: Tales of Childhood, 1984 (expanded as More About Boy, 2009)

Going Solo, 1986

Memories with Food: At Gipsy House, 1991 (with Felicity Dahl)

Roald Dahl's Cookbook, 1991 (with Felicity Dahl

Roald Dahl's Guide to Railway Safety, 1991

My Year, 1993

Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes, 1994 (with Felicity Dahl and Josie Fison)

Children’s/Young Adult Literature:

The Gremlins, 1943

James and the Giant Peach, 1961

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 1964

The Magic Finger, 1966

Fantastic Mr. Fox, 1970

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, 1972

Danny, the Champion of the World, 1975

The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar, 1977 (pb. in England as The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More)

The Complete Adventures of Charlie and Mr. Willy Wonka, 1978 (omnibus edition)

The Enormous Crocodile, 1978

The Twits, 1980

George’s Marvelous Medicine, 1981

The BFG, 1982

The Witches, 1983

The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me, 1985

Matilda, 1988

Esio Trot, 1990

The Vicar of Nibbleswicke, 1991

The Minpins, 1991

The Umbrella Man, and Other Stories, 1998 (pb. in England as The Great Automatic Grammatizator, and Other Stories)

Poetry:

Revolting Rhymes, 1982

Dirty Beasts, 1983

Rhyme Stew, 1989

Songs and Verse, 2005

Bibliography

Bradford, Clare. "The End of Empire? Colonial and Postcolonial Journeys in Children’s Books." Children’s Literature 29 (2001): 196-218. Compares Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Penelope Lively’s The House in Norham Gardens (1974) as two radically different interpretations of the theme of travel and colonialism that pervade nineteenth century children’s literature.

Dahl, Roald. Boy: Tales of Childhood. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984. The first volume of Dahl’s autobiography tells of his childhood in Wales, his visits to Norway to see relatives, and his schooling.

Dahl, Roald. Going Solo. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. The second volume of Dahl’s autobiography provides information on his work for the Shell Oil Company, in London and in Africa, and on his years in the Royal Air Force during World War II.

Salwak, Dale, and Daryl F. Mallet, eds. Roald Dahl: From the Gremlins to the Chocolate Factory, by Alan Warren. Rev. ed. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1994. A thorough study of Dahl and the evolution of his fiction. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Schultz, William Todd. "Finding Fate’s Father: Some Life History Influences on Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Biography 21 (Fall, 1998): 463-481. A psychobiographical analysis of Dahl’s novel, uncovering the sources of themes that run throughout the writer’s work.

Treglown, Jeremy. Roald Dahl: A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Treglown uncovers a Dahl more complex than his largely self-created public persona has previously suggested. Alternates discussions of Dahl’s fiction with biographical narrative; claims that in his ambition to be a successful public figure Dahl never really grew up.

Warren, Alan. Roald Dahl: From the Gremlins to the Chocolate Factory. Edited by Dale Salwak and Daryl F. Mallet. 2d ed., rev. and expanded. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1994. A thorough study of Dahl and the evolution of his fiction. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

West, Mark L. Roald Dahl. New York: Twayne, 1992. A general introduction to Dahl’s life and art. Discusses Dahl as a caricaturist who exaggerates certain character traits to focus the reader’s attention on behavior patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. Argues that, in his collection Kiss Kiss, Dahl focuses primarily on tensions between men and women, which, though not realistic, are drawn from real life.