Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl was born on September 13, 1916, in Llandaff, then a village on the edge of Cardiff in Wales, to Norwegian parents. His father, Harald Dahl, had emigrated from Norway and built a prosperous shipbroking business in Cardiff docks; his mother, Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, came from a family of Norwegian lawyers and clergy ^[1]. The boy was named after Roald Amundsen, the polar explorer who was a national hero in Norway at the time. Norwegian was spoken at home, summers were spent on islands in the Oslofjord, and Dahl kept his Norwegian citizenship alongside his British identity throughout his life ^[1].

Tragedy arrived early. In 1920, when Roald was three, his seven-year-old sister Astri died of appendicitis, and his father died of pneumonia only weeks later ^[2]. Sofie, pregnant at the time, chose to stay in Britain rather than return to Norway because her husband had wanted the children educated in English schools. Dahl later credited his mother's storytelling, particularly Norwegian tales of trolls and witches, as an influence on his own imagination ^[2].

His schooling supplied much of the raw material for his later fiction. He attended Llandaff Cathedral School, then boarding schools in England: St Peter's in Weston-super-Mare and Repton School in Derbyshire ^[1]. He remembered these years as harsh, marked by canings and casual cruelty from masters and older boys, experiences he described decades later in his memoir Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984) ^[2]. One brighter memory stuck: the Cadbury chocolate company periodically sent boxes of new chocolate bars to Repton pupils for testing, an arrangement Dahl said helped inspire Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ^[2].

Dahl skipped university. After leaving Repton in 1934 he joined the Shell petroleum company, and in 1938 the firm posted him to Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika, in East Africa ^[1]. When the Second World War began in 1939 he drove to Nairobi and enlisted in the Royal Air Force. Training as a fighter pilot, he was posted to a squadron in North Africa, and in September 1940 he crash-landed his Gloster Gladiator in the Libyan desert after running short of fuel while searching for a remote airstrip. The crash fractured his skull and left him temporarily blind ^[3].

After months of recovery in Alexandria he rejoined his squadron in time for the chaotic Greek campaign of 1941, flying Hawker Hurricanes against far larger German formations. Lingering effects of his head injuries eventually forced him out of combat flying, and in 1942 he was sent to Washington, D.C., as an assistant air attaché at the British Embassy ^[3]. There he also passed intelligence to the British Security Coordination organisation, part of a circle of British agents working to encourage American support for the war ^[4].

Washington made him a writer. The novelist C. S. Forester, gathering material for American readers, asked Dahl for notes about his crash; Dahl instead produced a finished narrative, and the Saturday Evening Post published it in August 1942 ^[3]. More stories followed, many drawing on flying, along with a whimsical piece about gremlins, the imaginary creatures RAF pilots blamed for mechanical faults. Walt Disney optioned the gremlins idea, and though the film was never made, the illustrated book The Gremlins (1943) became Dahl's first published book for children ^[4].

For roughly fifteen years after the war Dahl was known not as a children's author but as one of the sharpest short-story writers in English. His tales for adults, built on meticulous setups and cruel twists, appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and other magazines, and were gathered in collections including Someone Like You (1953) and Kiss Kiss (1960) ^[1]. Stories such as 'Lamb to the Slaughter', in which a wife kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and feeds the murder weapon to the investigating policemen, and 'Man from the South', a wager involving a cigarette lighter and a finger, became anthology staples ^[5].

He won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America three times for his short fiction ^[5]. Television extended his reach: several stories were adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and from 1979 Dahl introduced adaptations of his own work in the British anthology series Tales of the Unexpected, becoming a familiar on-screen presence ^[5].

He also worked in film. Dahl wrote the screenplay for the James Bond adventure You Only Live Twice (1967), taking generous liberties with Ian Fleming's novel, and shared screenplay credit on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), also adapted from a Fleming book ^[1]. He began the script for the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, based on his own novel, though he disliked the finished picture after other hands revised his draft ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Roald Dahl usually means the children's author, and that career began in earnest with James and the Giant Peach, published in the United States in 1961 ^[1]. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory followed in 1964 and became a phenomenon, its poor, honest hero and the eccentric confectioner Willy Wonka entering the common vocabulary of childhood ^[2]. Dahl said he started writing for children by inventing bedtime stories for his own daughters.

The books kept coming across three decades: Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972), Danny, the Champion of the World (1975), The Enormous Crocodile (1978), The Twits (1980), George's Marvellous Medicine (1981), The BFG (1982), The Witches (1983), and Matilda (1988), among others ^[1]. Revolting Rhymes (1982) reworked classic fairy tales into gleefully violent verse. From The Enormous Crocodile onward, the illustrator Quentin Blake provided the spiky, energetic drawings that became inseparable from Dahl's texts ^[2].

The recipe was distinctive: child heroes with real grievances, adult villains drawn with cartoonish savagery, invented words (Dahl's playful vocabulary was later collected in an Oxford dictionary of his coinages), and a refusal to talk down to young readers ^[2]. Critics sometimes objected to the vengefulness and grotesquerie; children rarely did. The Witches won the Whitbread Children's Book Award in 1983, and Matilda has repeatedly topped polls of favourite children's books in Britain ^[2]. His books have been translated into dozens of languages, with total sales estimated at more than 300 million copies worldwide ^[6].

In 1953 Dahl married the American actress Patricia Neal, whom he had met in New York. The couple had five children: Olivia, Tessa, Theo, Ophelia, and Lucy ^[1]. Their family life was struck by a series of disasters that Dahl met with characteristic stubbornness. In 1960 the infant Theo suffered severe head injuries when a taxi hit his pram in New York; to relieve the fluid on his brain, Dahl worked with the hydraulic engineer Stanley Wade and the neurosurgeon Kenneth Till to develop the Wade-Dahl-Till valve, a cerebral shunt that was subsequently used in the treatment of other children ^[7].

Worse came in 1962, when seven-year-old Olivia died of complications from measles. Her death haunted Dahl for the rest of his life, and he later wrote a public letter urging parents to immunise their children against the disease ^[7]. In 1965 Neal, then pregnant, suffered a series of ruptured aneurysms; Dahl organised and drove an intensive, sometimes ruthless rehabilitation programme that helped her recover her speech and return to acting, a story that itself became a film ^[1].

The marriage ended in divorce in 1983, and that year Dahl married Felicity Crosland, known as Liccy ^[1]. Home from the 1950s onward was Gipsy House in the village of Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, where Dahl wrote in a small brick hut in the garden, seated in a wing-backed chair with a sleeping bag over his legs and a board across the arms, writing in pencil on yellow legal pads ^[2]. Among the darker Roald Dahl facts is that he made antisemitic statements in interviews in the 1980s, remarks that drew condemnation then and since; in 2020 his family and estate published an apology for the hurt they caused ^[8].

Dahl's final decade was his most productive as a children's author, producing The BFG, The Witches, and Matilda in quick succession, along with the autobiographical volumes Boy (1984) and Going Solo (1986), which recounted his childhood and his African and wartime years ^[1]. In 1983 he received the World Fantasy Award for life achievement, and in 1988 the Children's Book Award from the Federation of Children's Book Groups for Matilda ^[2].

He remained a public figure in Britain, tall (about six feet five inches), opinionated, and quotable, appearing on television and campaigning on causes from literacy to immunisation. He reportedly declined an OBE, and no knighthood came in his lifetime ^[6].

Roald Dahl died of a rare blood cancer, myelodysplastic syndrome, on November 23, 1990, at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, at the age of 74 ^[1]. He was buried in the churchyard of St Peter and St Paul in Great Missenden. His last children's books, Esio Trot (1990) and the posthumous The Minpins (1991), appeared around his death ^[2].

Few twentieth-century authors match the afterlife of Dahl's work. Among the most visible Roald Dahl achievements is the sheer scale of continuing readership: his books sell millions of copies every year decades after his death, and estimates of lifetime sales exceed 300 million ^[6]. Film-makers return to him constantly, from the 1971 and 2005 versions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Wes Anderson's animated Fantastic Mr Fox (2009), Steven Spielberg's The BFG (2016), and Matilda the Musical, the Royal Shakespeare Company stage show that won multiple Olivier Awards and later became a film ^[6].

His home village became a place of pilgrimage. The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre opened in Great Missenden in 2005, preserving his writing hut and archive, while the Roald Dahl's Marvellous Children's Charity, founded by his widow, funds specialist nurses for seriously ill children in Britain ^[7]. September 13, his birthday, is marked annually as Roald Dahl Day. The estate sold the Roald Dahl Story Company to Netflix in 2021, one of the largest single-author acquisitions in publishing history ^[6].

His reputation is contested as well as celebrated. The antisemitic remarks of his later years remain a permanent stain acknowledged by his own family ^[8], and a 2023 decision by his publisher to revise wording in his children's books provoked an international argument about posthumous editing, ending in a compromise that kept the original texts in print alongside the new ones ^[6]. The books themselves, anarchic, funny, and firmly on the side of the child, remain the core of the story: a Welsh-born son of Norwegian immigrants who crashed in a desert, spied in Washington, and then, from a garden shed, changed what children's literature was allowed to be.