However, even after all these years, Roald Dahl is still best known as one of the most beloved British children’s authors. His books (The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox), short books (The Enormous Crocodile) and poetry (Revolting Rhymes) are funny, mischievous, and filled with joyfully inventive language. All of these books have been illustrated by the iconic Quentin Blake, the first Children’s Laureate. His illustrations tend to capture the spiky and subversive side of Roald’s work so well; they have become inseparable from the books. His first children's book was The Gremlins, published in 1943, about mischievous little creatures that were part of Royal Air Force folklore. [104] The RAF pilots blamed the gremlins for all the problems with the aircraft. [105] The protagonist Gus—an RAF pilot, like Dahl—joins forces with the gremlins against a common enemy, Hitler and the Nazis. [106] While at the British Embassy in Washington, Dahl sent a copy to the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who read it to her grandchildren, [104] and the book was commissioned by Walt Disney for a film that was never made. [107] Dahl went on to write some of the best-loved children's stories of the 20th century, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, The BFG, The Twits and George's Marvellous Medicine. [5]

Some of Dahl's 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. [117] In his novel My Uncle Oswald, the uncle engages a temptress to seduce 20th century geniuses and royalty with a love potion secretly added to chocolate truffles made by Dahl's favourite chocolate shop, Prestat of Piccadilly, London. [117] 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. [118] [119] Selected Works: James and the Giant Peach (1961), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970), The BFG (1982), Matilda (1988)Roald Dahl’s last long story follows the adventures of a genius five-year-old girl, Matilda Wormwood, who uses her powers to help her beloved teacher outwit the cruel headmistress. Movies a b c d "Roald Dahl". Contemporary Authors. Gale . Retrieved 5 February 2016. (subscription required) I first encountered the work of Roald Dahl in third grade, by playing a character in a classroom adaptation of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Not long after that, I read “James and the Giant Peach.” I was not a child who particularly cared for children’s literature, but even as an eight- or nine-year-old I was captivated by the way Dahl’s fantasias took on their own logic, their own momentum, and were driven as much by the flow of language as by the absurdities of plot. Put another way, reading Dahl was my introduction to the importance of the teller, the idea that a successful story was less a matter of narrative than of voice—or not less, exactly, for Dahl’s writing is nothing if not plotted. But he made me aware that the narrator, whether third person or first, is not a neutral figure but an active, even directive, force. (This discovery may have had something to do with the role I played in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”: I was the narrator.) Unfortunately, Dahl did not mellow with age (he was desperately disappointed that he was never offered a knighthood), and he became well known for creating ‘scenes’ in public, and especially for his racist and misogynous comments.

After leaving Repton in 1934, Dahl joined the Shell Oil Company, and spent an exciting few years in Tanganyika. At the outbreak of war, he signed up with the Royal Air Force, receiving his training in Kenya and Iraq before being posted to the Number 80 Fighter Squadron based in the western deserts of Libya. Dahl’s first novel (and least-known book), Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen, was written at high speed during the summer of 1946, and first published by Scribner in the U.S. in 1948, and by Collins in Britain the following year. The dreaded headmaster who succeeded Fisher and who made the lives of so many Repton pupils a misery was J. T. Christie who, according to the philosopher, Richard Wollheim, “rejoiced in beating boys” (he moved on to Westminster in 1937). If Dahl mixed up these two men, then how many of the other ‘facts’ in his two volumes of memoirs can be trusted? Much is clarified in Treglown’s book. I wanted to ask him how he could be so absolutely sure that other creatures did not get the same special treatment as us. I sat there wondering if this great and famous churchman really knew what he was talking about and whether he knew anything at all about God or heaven, and if he didn't, then who in the world did?" [90]The stories in Switch Bitch have been rightly slammed for their cruel and misogynistic aspects. The central motive of ‘The Last Act’ has been particularly decried, and even Dahl’s biographer, Jeremy Treglown, said that the story was better off being scrapped as it has “no purpose as a mechanism other than to lead to a crudely sensationalist conclusion.”

According to Dahl's autobiography, Boy: Tales of Childhood, a friend named Michael was viciously caned by headmaster Geoffrey Fisher. Writing in that same book, Dahl reflected: "All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed literally to wound other boys, and sometimes quite severely... I couldn't get over it. I never have got over it." [40] Fisher was later appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, and he crowned Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. However, according to Dahl's biographer Jeremy Treglown, [41] the caning took place in May 1933, a year after Fisher had left Repton; the headmaster was in fact J. T. Christie, Fisher's successor as headmaster. Dahl said the incident caused him to "have doubts about religion and even about God". [42] He viewed the brutality of the caning as being the result of the headmaster's enmity towards children, an attitude Dahl would later attribute to the Grand High Witch in The Witches who exclaims that "children are rrreee-volting!". [37] On the other hand, Dahl defended the books of Enid Blyton, pointing out that — whatever adults felt about them — they remained popular with millions of children. Of course, as she’d been dead for almost twenty years, she was no longer a threat to him, although she is still his only rival in terms of popularity and sales. Grigsby, John L (1994). "Roald Dahl". In Baldwin, Dean (ed.). Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1945–1980. Detroit: Gale Research. ISBN 978-0-8103-5398-5. Conant, Jennet (2008). The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington. London: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-9458-4.

9. My Uncle Oswald

One common theme amongst many Roald Dahl’s stories is a young child seeking revenge on evil adults and wrongdoers. Dahl has invented more than 500 memorable words and character names across his work, such as Oompa-Loompa, scrumdiddlyumptious, snozzcumbers and frobscottle. Another interesting (lesser-known) fact about Roald Dahl is that he named his fantasy language Gobblefunk. The Oxford University Press even created a unique Roald Dahl Dictionary, which featured nearly 8000 words he used in his stories. In Going Solo, Dahl describes many heroic exploits, from being “shot down and crippled in an air-battle” to inventing the RAF expression, ‘gremlins’. Treglown shows that Dahl was not shot down as he often claimed: in fact he ran out of petrol and was forced to crash land. He also reveals that he was officially a flight lieutenant, and not a ‘wing commander’ as he claimed in Who’s Who. After finishing his schooling, in August 1934 Dahl crossed the Atlantic on the RMS Nova Scotia and hiked through Newfoundland with the Public Schools Exploring Society. [51] [52] These stories, along with a number of others written between 1953 and 1959 — eleven in all — make up Dahl’ s third collection, Kiss Kiss, published by Knopf in early February 1960, with a massive advertising campaign linking it to St. Valentine’s Day! The print-run of the first edition was much larger than that for Someone Like You— 24,000 copies, of which two-thirds had been sold by April.