Roald Dahl

Biography

Roald Dahl (September 13, 1916 to November 23, 1990) was a British author who penned 19 children's books over his decades-long writing career. In 1953 he published the best-selling story collection Someone Like You and married actress Patricia Neal. He published the popular book James and the Giant Peach in 1961. In 1964 he released another highly successful work, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was later adapted for two films.

Early Life
Roald Dahl was born September 13, 1916, in Llandaff, South Wales, United Kingdom, to Norwegian parents. He spent his childhood summers visiting his grandparents in Oslo, Norway. He was a mischievous child, full of energy, and from an early age he proved himself skilled at finding trouble. His earliest memory was of pedaling to school at a very fast speed on his tricycle, with his two sisters struggling to keep up as he whizzed around curves on two wheels.

After his father died when Dahl was four, his mother followed her late husband's wish that Dahl be sent to English schools. Dahl first attended Llandaff Cathedral School, where he began a series of unfortunate adventures in school. After he and several other students were severely beaten by the principal for placing a dead mouse in a storekeeper's candy jar, Dahl's mother moved him to St. Peter's Boarding School and later to Repton, an excellent private school. Dahl would later describe his school years as "days of horrors" filled with "rules, rules and still more rules that had to be obeyed," which inspired much of his gruesome fiction. Though not a good student, his mother nevertheless offered him the option of attending Oxford or Cambridge University when he finished school. His reply, recorded in his book about his childhood called Boy: Tales of Childhood, was, "No, thank you. I want to go straight from school to work for a company that will send me to wonderful faraway places like Africa or China."

Career
fter graduating from Repton, Dahl took a position with the Shell Oil Company in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Africa. In 1939 he joined a Royal Air Force training squadron in Nairobi, Kenya, serving as a fighter pilot in the Mediterranean during World War II (1939–45). Dahl suffered severe head injuries in a plane crash near Alexandria, Egypt. Upon recovering he was sent to Washington, D.C., to be an assistant air attache (a technical expert who advises government representatives). There Dahl began his writing career, publishing a short story in the Saturday Evening Post. Soon his stories appeared in many other magazines. Dahl told Willa Petschek in a New York Times Book Review profile that "as I went on, the stories became less and less realistic and more fantastic. But becoming a writer was pure fluke. Without being asked to, I doubt if I'd ever have thought of it."

In 1943 Dahl wrote his first children's story, The Gremlins, and invented a new term in the process. Gremlins were small creatures that lived on fighter planes and bombers and were responsible for all crashes. Through the 1940s and into the 1950s Dahl continued as a short story writer for adults, establishing his reputation as a writer of deathly tales with unexpected twists. His stories earned him three Edgar Allan Poe Awards from the Mystery Writers of America.