Roald Dahl
About Author
From the publication of JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH and CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY in the 1960s to his death in 1990, Roald Dahl has become the most successful children's author in the world.
Roald Dahl was born in 1916. His father and elder sister died when Roald was just three. His mother was left to raise two stepchildren and her own four children. Roald was her only son. He had an unhappy time at school which was to greatly influence his writing.At 18, rather than going to university, Roald joined the Public Schools Exploring Society's expedition to Newfoundland. He then started work for Shell as a salesman in Dar es Salaam.
He was 23 when war broke out and signed up with the Royal Air Force in Nairobi. he was accepted as a pilot officer and spent the war flying birdplane Gladiator fighters against the Italians in the Western Desert of Libya. Dahl's exploits in the war are detailed in his autobiography GOING SOLO. They include having a luger pointed at his head by the leader of a German convoy, crashlanding in no-man's land (and sustaining injuries that entailed having his nose pulled out and shaped!) and even surviving a direct hit during the Battle of Athens.
Eventually, he was sent home as an invalid but transferred, in 1942, to Washington as an air attache. Here Dahl's writing career began in earnest following a meeting with C S Forrester, author of CAPTAIN HORNBLOWER. Forrester asked Dahl to describe his version of the war, intending to write an account for an American audience. Dahl chose to write down his experiences. Forrester was so impressed with Dahl's writing that he immediately found a magazine editor to take it for publication. Roald remained in the States, achieving recognition through short-stories for newspapers and magazines.
Roald Dahl's first novel for children was not, as many suppose, JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH but THE GREMLINS, which was published in 1943 and adapted from a script written for Disney. Dahl went on to write several film scripts, including the James Bond adventure YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE and CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG. He disliked many of the film adaptions of his own work, which appeared in his lifetime.
Dahl and his family moved back to England in 1960 and settled in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire at Gipsy House. It was here, in a small hut at the bottom of the garden, that he would write most of his unforgettable books.
By all accounts, the hut was a dingy little place but one that Roald viewed as a cosy refuge. Christopher Simon Sykes in Harpers & Queen recalls 'A dirty plastic curtain covered the window. In the centre stood a faded wing-back armchair, inherited from his mother, and it was here that Dahl sat, his feet propped up on a chest, his legs covered by a tartan rug, supporting on his knees a thick roll of corrugated paper upon which was propped his writing board. Photographs, drawings and other mementoes were pinned to the walls, while a table on his right was covered with a collection of favourite curiosities such as one of his own arthritic hip bones, and a remarkably heavy ball made from the discarded silver paper of numerous chocolate bars consumed during his youth.'
Roald's career had to take second place when his family suffered several tragedies. His oldest daughter Olivia died after a bout of measles developed into encephalitis (inflammation of the brain). Roald's three-year-old son Theo was brain-damaged after a road accident and could scarcely function. With the help of two friends, an engineer and a neurosurgeon, Roald spent months devising a valve for draining fluid from the brain to enable Theo to live independent of machines. The Dahl-Wade-Till valve is still in use today and Theo has made a spectacular recovery - now in his 30s, he recently married. Patricia Neal, Roald's first wife, suffered three massive strokes but, with Roald's help and encouragement, she too recovered sufficiently to resume her acting career.
Both JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH and CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY were published in the USA several years before appearing in the UK in 1967. Of the latter, Elaine Moss wrote in The Times, 'It is the funniest children's book I have read in years; not just funny but shot through with a zany pathos which touches the young heart.' The book went on to achieve phenomenal success all over the world. The Chinese edition was the biggest printing of any book ever two million copies!
An unbroken string of bestselling titles followed, including The BFG, DANNY THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD, THE TWITS, THE WITCHES, BOY and GOING SOLO. Sales of MATILDA, Roald's penultimate book, broke all previous records for a
work of children's fiction with UK sales of over half a million paperbacks in six months.
Roald Dahl died in 1990 at the age of 74. He was working to the end on The Vicar of Nibbleswicke.
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