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Roald Dahl
Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1954Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1954
Born13 September 1916
Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales
Died23 November 1990, age 74
Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, England
OccupationNovelist, short story writer
GenreChildren
Website
http://www.roalddahl.com/

Roald Dahl (IPA: [ˌɹəʊ̯əld ˈdɑːl]) (13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a Welsh novelist, short story author and screenwriter of Norwegian descent who made his home mostly in England, famous as a writer for both children and adults.

Among his most popular books are Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The Witches, The BFG, and Kiss Kiss.

Biography

Roald Dahl was born at 32 Fairwater Road, Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales in 1916, to Norwegian parents, Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl (née Hesselberg). Dahl's family moved from Norway and settled in Cardiff in the 1880s. Roald was named after the polar explorer Roald Amundsen, a national hero in Norway at the time. He spoke Norwegian at home with parents and sisters. 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, or rather of sadness of the death of his favorite child, at the age of 57. His mother, however, rather than move back to Norway to live with her relatives, decided to stay in the UK — it had been her husband's wish to have their children educated in British schools, as he thought they were the best in the world.

Roald first attended Llandaff Cathedral School. At the age of eight, he and four of his friends were caned by the headmaster after putting a dead mouse in a jar of sweets at the local sweet shop, which was owned by a "mean and loathsome" old woman called Mrs. Pratchett. This was known amongst the five boys as the "Great Mouse Plot of 1923".

Thereafter, he was sent to several boarding schools in England, which was an unpleasant experience for him. He was very homesick and wrote to his mother almost every day, but never revealed to her his unhappiness. 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.

At Repton School in Derbyshire, he was the fag of a prefect, in whose study he had his little desk for the greater part of his early years. He was very tall, reaching 6'6" (1.98m) in adult life, and he was good at sports, being made captain of the school Fives and Squash team, and also playing for the football team. This helped his popularity. He developed an interest in photography. During his years there, Cadbury, a chocolate company, would occasionally send boxes of new chocolates to the school to be tested by the pupils. Dahl himself apparently used to dream of inventing a new chocolate bar that would win the praise of Mr. Cadbury himself, and this proved the inspiration for him to write his third book for children, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Throughout his childhood and adolescent years, he spent his summer holidays in his parents' native Norway, mostly enjoying the Fjords. His childhood is the subject of his autobiographical work, Boy: Tales of Childhood.

After finishing his schooling, he spent three weeks hiking through Newfoundland with a group called the Public Schools' Exploring Society. In July 1934, he joined the Shell Petroleum Company. 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. While on the job, supplying oil to customers across Tanganyika, he encountered black mambas and lions, amongst other wildlife.

World War II

In August 1939, as World War II was imminent, plans were made to round up the hundreds of Germans in Dar-es-Salaam. The fifteen or so British citizens in Dar-es-Salaam, in Tanzania, including Dahl, were made officers, each commanding a platoon of askaris of the King's African Rifles. Dahl was uneasy about this and having to round up hundreds of German civilians, but managed to complete his orders.

It was soon after this incident, in November 1939, that he joined the Royal Air Force. After a 600-mile car journey from Dar-es-Salaam to Nairobi, he was accepted for flight training with 20 other men, 17 of whom would later die in air combat. With 7 hours and 40 minutes experience in his De Havilland Tiger Moth he flew solo, and hugely enjoyed watching the wildlife of Kenya during his flights. He continued on to advanced flying training at RAF Habbaniya (50 miles west of Baghdad) in Iraq. Following six months of flying Hawker Harts he was made a Pilot Officer and assigned to No. 80 Squadron RAF, flying obsolete Gloster Gladiators. Dahl was surprised to find that he would not be trained in aerial combat, or even taught how to fly a Gladiator.

On 19 September 1940, Dahl was ordered to fly his Gladiator from Abu Suweir in Egypt, on to Amiriya to refuel, and again to Fouka in Libya for a second refuelling. From there he would fly to 80 Squadron's forward airstrip 30 miles south of Mersah Matruh. On the final leg, he could not find the airstrip and, running low on fuel and with night approaching, he was forced to attempt a landing in the desert. Unfortunately, the undercarriage hit a boulder and the plane crashed, fracturing his skull, smashing his nose in, and blinding him. He managed to drag himself away from the blazing wreckage and passed out. Later, he wrote about the crash for his first published work (see below). It was found in a RAF inquiry into the crash that the location he had been told to fly to was completely wrong, and he had mistakenly been sent instead to the no man's land between the British and Italian forces.

Dahl was rescued and taken to a first-aid post in Mersah Matruh, where he regained consciousness, but not his sight, and was then taken by train to the Royal Navy hospital in Alexandria. There he fell in love with a nurse, Mary Welland, who was the first person he saw when he regained his sight after eight weeks. (He had only fallen in love with her voice while he was blind. Once he regained his sight he decided that he no longer loved her.) The doctors said he had no chance of flying again, but in February 1941, five months after he was admitted to the hospital, he was discharged and passed fully fit for flying duties.

By this time, 80 Squadron were at Elevsis, near Athens, Greece, and equipped with Hawker Hurricane fighting with the British Expeditionary Force in the Battle of Greece. He flew a replacement Hurricane across the Mediterranean Sea in April 1941, although he had little instruction, and only seven hours practice on Hurricanes. By this stage in the battle for Greece the RAF had only 18 combat planes in Greece, 14 Hurricanes and 4 Bristol Blenheims.

He saw his first aerial fighting on 15 April over the city of Chalcis against the six bombers that were attacking ships, managing to shoot down a Ju 88 with his lone Hurricane. On 16 April in another air battle, he shot down another Ju 88. On 20 April Dahl took part in the Battle of Athens along with Squadron Leader 'Pat' Pattle and his friend David Coke, shooting down indefinite amounts of planes.

As the Germans were pressing Athens, Dahl was evacuated back to Egypt.

80 Squadron was reassembled in Haifa, Palestine. From here, Dahl flew missions every day for a period of four weeks, downing a Potez 63 on June 8 and another Ju-88 on 15 June, but then he began to get blinding headaches that gave him black-outs in the air, and he was invalided home to Britain. At this time his rank was Flight Lieutenant.

He began writing in 1942, after he was transferred to Washington as Assistant Air Attaché. 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 piece of war propaganda was A Piece of Cake — the title was changed to sound more dramatic, despite the fact that the crash had nothing to do with enemy action.

During the war C.S. 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 murky world of the Canadian spymaster William Stephenson, known widely as 'Intrepid'. During the war Dahl supplied Washington intelligence to Stephenson and his organization known as British Security Coordination. When Dahl was sent back to Britain, for supposed misconduct by British Embassy officials," I got booted out by the big boys," Dahl remembered, Stephenson sent him back to Washington - with a promotion. After the war Dahl wrote some of the history of the secret organization and he and Stephenson remained friends for decades after the war.

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

Later life

Family

He was married for 30 years (from 1953 to 1983) to the Academy Award winning American actress Patricia Neal (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Hud, The Subject Was Roses, A Face in the Crowd). They had five children: Olivia (died of measles encephalitis, aged seven), Tessa, Theo, Ophelia, and Lucy.

When he was four months old, Theo Dahl 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 burst cerebral aneurysms while pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy. Roald took control of her rehabilitation and she eventually relearned to talk and walk. They were divorced in 1983 following a very turbulent marriage, and he subsequently married Felicity ("Liccy") Crosland, to whom he was married until his 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 the "helpmate" 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 is 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 to 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, and he adapted his own work into Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971).

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 not at all veiled – 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

Children's poetry

Adult fiction

Novels

Short story collections

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

Roald Dahl
Children's fiction
Children's poetry
Adult novels
Short story
collections
Non-fiction
Film adaptations
Film scripts
Television series
Musicals and plays
See also

Sources

References

  1. Cambridge Guide to Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1989) ISBN 0-521-26751-X.
  2. Bill Macdonald - The True Intrepid p249 (Raincoast 2001)ISBN 1-55192-418-8 Dahl also speaks about his espionage work in the documentary The True Intrepid
  3. Macdonald - The True Intrepid p243 ISBN 1-55192-418-8.
  4. Christopher Shores and Clive Williams – Aces High: A Tribute to the Most Notable Fighter Pilots of the British and Commonwealth Air Forces in WWII (Grub Street Publishing, 1994) ISBN 1-898697-00-0.
  5. "Water on the Brain". MedGadget: Internet Journal of Emerging Medical Technologies. 2005-07-15. Retrieved 2006-05-11. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  6. Roald Dahl An Autobiography, Jeremy Treglown (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994), pp. 255-256.
  7. 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
  8. "Leak reveals honours snubs" BBC News Sunday, 21 December, 2003
  9. Margaret Talbot article from The New Yorker.
  10. Abraham Foxman. "Roald Dahl Also Left a Legacy of Bigotry." New York Times, Dec. 7, 1990, pg. A34.
  11. Source: written for a leaflet published in 1986 by Sandwell Health Authority (now Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust). Reproduced at http://www.blacktriangle.org/blog/?p=715.

External links

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
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