biography of roald dahl in english

Children's author Roald Dahl wrote the kids' classics 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,' 'Matilda' and 'James and the Giant Peach,' among other famous works.

(1916-1990)

Who Was Roald Dahl?

Roald Dahl 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 and Education

Dahl was born in Llandaff, South Wales, on September 13, 1916. Dahl's parents were Norwegian. As a child, he spent his summer vacations visiting with his grandparents in Oslo. When Dahl was four years old, his father died.

The young Dahl received his earliest education at Llandaff Cathedral School. When the principal gave him a harsh beating for playing a practical joke, Dahl's mother decided to enroll her rambunctious and mischievous child at St. Peter's, a British boarding school, as had been her husband's wish.

Dahl later transferred to Repton, a private school with a reputation for academic excellence. He resented the rules at Repton; while there, the lively and imaginative youngster was restless and ached for adventure.

While Dahl hardly excelled as a student, his mother offered to pay for his tuition at Oxford or Cambridge University when he graduated. Dahl's response, as quoted from his autobiography, 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."

And that he did. After Dahl graduated from Repton in 1932, he went on an expedition to Newfoundland. Afterward, he took a job with the Shell Oil Company in Tanzania, Africa, where he remained until 1939.

Lusting for yet more adventure, in 1939, Dahl joined the Royal Air Force. After training in Nairobi, Kenya, he became a World War II fighter pilot . While serving in the Mediterranean, Dahl crash-landed in Alexandria, Egypt. The plane crash left him with serious injuries to his skull, spine and hip. Following a recovery that included a hip replacement and two spinal surgeries, Dahl was transferred to Washington, D.C., where he became an assistant air attaché.

Over his decades-long writing career, Dahl composed 19 children’s books. Despite their popularity, Dahl’s children’s books have been the subject of some controversy, as critics and parents have balked at their portrayal of children’s harsh revenge on adult wrongdoers. In his defense, Dahl claimed that children have a cruder sense of humor than adults, and that he was merely trying to appeal to his readers.

'James and the Giant Peach' (1961)

Dahl first established himself as a children’s writer in 1961, when he published the book James and the Giant Peach , a book about a lonely little boy living with his two mean aunts who meets the Old Green Grasshopper and his insect friends on a giant, magical peach. The book met with wide critical and commercial acclaim.

'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' (1964)

Three years after his first children’s book, Dahl published another big winner, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . A quirky, solitary businessman, Willy Wonka, has been holed up alone inside his fantastical chocolate factory until he releases five golden tickets inside the wrappers of candy bars. Winners — including the poor little boy Charlie Bucket, who doesn’t have much to eat — are awarded a visit. Some critics have accused Dahl of portraying a racist stereotype with his Oompa-Loompa characters in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

'Fantastic Mr. Fox' (1970)

Three farmers are out to get the cunning trickster Mr. Fox, who outwits them every time. Mr. Fox lives in a tree with his wife and family, which was inspired by a real 150-year beech tree Dahl knew as the “witches tree” standing outside his house.

'The BFG' (1982)

Of his many stories, Roald Dahl said The BFG was his favorite. He came up with the idea for a giant who stores dreams in bottles for kids to enjoy when they sleep several years before, and he told the story of the Big Friendly Giant to his own kids at bedtime.

'The Witches' (1983)

A boy happens upon a witch convention, where the witches are planning to get rid of every last child in England. The boy and his grandmother must battle the witches to save the children.

'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.

Dahl wrote several television and movie scripts. Several film adaptations of his books have also been created (all of those made during his lifetime Dahl famously despised), most notably:

'Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' (1971)

This Dahl favorite, originally known as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a book, starred Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. An originally titled remake of the film, starring Johnny Depp , was released in 2005.

'The BFG' (1989, 2016)

The BFG was first made into a stop-motion animated film in 1989, with David Jason playing the voice of the Big Friendly Giant. The movie was remade in 2016 by Steven Spielberg and featured live actors.

'The Witches' (1990)

In this live-action film features Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch. Rowan Atkinson also appeared as hotel manager Mr. Stringer.

'Matilda' (1996)

Danny DeVito directed this movie adaptation and also voiced the narrator.

'The Fantastic Mr. Fox' (2009)

In 2009, Wes Anderson directed this quirky, touching animated feature about the adventures of the farm-raiding Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney ), with a cast including Meryl Streep (Mrs. Fox) and Bill Murray (Badger).

'The Witches' (2020)

Another live-action film of the book starring Anne Hathaway .

Short Stories

Dahl began his writing career with short stories; in all, he published nine short story collections. Dahl first caught the writing bug while in Washington, D.C., when he met with author C.S. Forrester, who encouraged him to start writing. Dahl published his first short story in the Saturday Evening Post . He went on to write stories and articles for other magazines, including The New Yorker .

Of his early writing career, Dahl told New York Times book reviewer Willa Petschek, "As I went on the stories became less and less realistic and more fantastic." He went on to describe his foray into writing as a "pure fluke," saying, "Without being asked to, I doubt if I'd ever have thought to do it."

Dahl wrote his first story for children, The Gremlins , in 1942, for Walt Disney . The story wasn't terribly successful, so Dahl went back to writing macabre and mysterious stories geared toward adult readers. He continued in this vein into the 1950s, producing the best-selling story collection Someone Like You in 1953, and Kiss, Kiss in 1959.

Wives and Children

The same year that Someone Like You was published, Dahl married film actress Patricia Neal, who won an Academy Award for her role in Hud in 1961. The marriage lasted three decades and resulted in five children, one of whom tragically died in 1962.

Dahl told his children nightly bedtime stories that inspired his future career as a children's writer. These stories became the basis for some of his most popular kids' books, as his children proved an informative test audience. "Children are ... highly critical. And they lose interest so quickly," he asserted in his New York Times book review interview. “You have to keep things ticking along. And if you think a child is getting bored, you must think up something that jolts it back. Something that tickles. You have to know what children like."

After Neal suffered from multiple brain hemorrhages in the mid-1960s, Dahl stood by her through her long recovery. The couple would eventually divorce in 1983. Soon after, Dahl married Felicity Ann Crosland, his partner until his death in 1990.

Dahl died on November 23, 1990, at the age of 74. After suffering an unspecified infection, on November 12, 1990, Dahl had been admitted to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Roald Dahl
• Birth Year: 1916
• Birth date: September 13, 1916
• Birth City: Llandaff, South Wales
• Birth Country: United Kingdom
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Children's author Roald Dahl wrote the kids' classics 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,' 'Matilda' and 'James and the Giant Peach,' among other famous works.
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Virgo
• Interesting Facts
• Of the films that were adapted from his books during his lifetime, Roald Dahl came to despise them.
• Of his many stories, Roald Dahl said 'The BFG' was his favorite.
• Death Year: 1990
• Death date: November 23, 1990
• Death City: Oxford
• Death Country: United Kingdom

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

• Children are ... highly critical. And they lose interest so quickly. You have to keep things ticking along. And if you think a child is getting bored, you must think up something that jolts it back. Something that tickles. You have to know what children like.
• 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.
• A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
• The writer for children must be a jokey sort of a fellow. He must like simple tricks and jokes and riddles and other childish things. He must be ... inventive. He must have a really first-class plot.

Famous British People

Ralph Fiennes

Liam Payne’s Girlfriend Speaks Out After His Death

Daniel Day-Lewis

Maggie Smith

Alan Cumming

Olivia Colman

Richard III

20 Shakespeare Quotes

William Shakespeare

Andy Murray

• Humanities ›
• Literature ›
• Classic Literature ›
• Authors & Texts ›

Biography of Roald Dahl, British Novelist

The Memorable Author of Iconic Children's Novels

Ronald Dumont / Getty Images

• Authors & Texts
• Top Picks Lists
• Study Guides
• Best Sellers
• Plays & Drama
• Shakespeare
• Short Stories
• Children's Books

• M.F.A, Dramatic Writing, Arizona State University
• B.A., English Literature, Arizona State University
• B.A., Political Science, Arizona State University

Roald Dahl (September 13, 1916–November 23, 1990) was a British writer. After serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II , he became a world-famous author, particularly due to his best-selling books for children.

Fast Facts: Roald Dahl

• Known For:  English author of children's novels and adult short stories
• Born:  September 13, 1916 in Cardiff, Wales
• Parents:  Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl ( née  Hesselberg)
• Died:  November 23, 1990 in Oxford, England
• Education:  Repton School
• Selected Works:   James and the Giant Peach (1961), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970), The BFG (1982), Matilda (1988)
• Spouses:  Patricia Neal (m. 1953-1983), Felicity Crosland (m. 1983)
• Children:  Olivia Twenty Dahl, Chantal Sophia "Tessa" Dahl, Theo Matthew Dahl, Ophelia Magdalena Dahl, Lucy Neal Dahl
• Notable Quote:  “Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”

Dahl was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1916, in the district of Llandaff. His parents were Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl (née Hesselberg), both of whom were Norwegian immigrants. Harold had originally immigrated from Norway in the 1880s and lived in Cardiff with his French first wife, with whom he had two children (a daughter, Ellen, and a son, Louis) before her death in 1907. Sofie immigrated later and married Harold in 1911. They had five children, Roald and his four sisters Astri, Alfhild, Else, and Asta, all of whom they raised Lutheran. In 1920, Astri died suddenly of appendicitis, and Harold died of pneumonia only weeks later; Sofie was pregnant with Asta at the time. Instead of returning to her family in Norway, she stayed in the UK, wanting to follow her husband’s wishes to give their children an English education.

As a boy, Dahl was sent to an English public boarding school , St. Peter’s. He was intensely unhappy during his time there, but never let his mother know how he felt about it. In 1929, he moved to Repton School in Derbyshire, which he found equally unpleasant due to the culture of intense hazing and the cruelty with which older students dominated and bullied the younger ones; his hatred for corporal punishment stemmed from his school experiences. One of the cruel headmasters he loathed, Geoffrey Fisher, later became the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the association somewhat soured Dahl on religion.

Surprisingly, he was not noted as a particularly talented writer during his schoolboy days; in fact, many of his evaluations reflected precisely the opposite. He did enjoy literature, as well as sports and photography. Another of his iconic creations was sparked by his schooling experiences: the Cadbury chocolate company occasionally sent samples of new products to be tested by Repton students, and Dahl’s imagination of new chocolate creations would later turn into his famous Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . He graduated in 1934 and took a job with the Shell Petroleum Company; he was sent as an oil supplier to Kenya and Tanganyika (modern-day Tanzania).

World War II Pilot

In 1939, Dahl was first commissioned by the army to lead a platoon of indigenous troops as World War II broke out . Soon after, however, he switched to the Royal Air Force , despite having very little experience as a pilot, and underwent months of training before he was deemed fit for combat in the fall of 1940. His first mission, however, went badly awry. After being given instructions that later proved to be inaccurate, he wound up crashing in the Egyptian desert and suffering serious injuries that took him out of combat for several months. He did manage to return to combat in 1941. During this time, he had five aerial victories, which qualified him as a flying ace, but by September 1941, severe headaches and blackouts led to him being invalided home.

Dahl attempted to qualify as an RAF training officer, but instead wound up accepting the post of assistant air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. Although unimpressed and uninterested with his diplomatic posting, he became acquainted with C.S. Forester, a British novelist who was tasked with producing Allied propaganda for American audiences. Forester asked Dahl to write down some of his war experiences to be turned into a story, but when he received Dahl’s manuscript, he instead published it as Dahl had written it. He wound up working with other authors, including David Ogilvy and Ian Fleming, to help promote British war interests, and worked in espionage as well, at one point passing information from Washington to Winston Churchill himself.

The knack for children’s stories that would make Dahl famous first appeared during the war as well. In 1943, he published The Gremlins , turning an inside joke in the RAF (“gremlins” were to blame for any aircraft problems) into a popular story that counted Eleanor Roosevelt and Walt Disney among its fans. When the war ended, Dahl had held the rank of wing commander and squadron leader. Several years after the end of the war, in 1953, he married Patricia Neal, an American actress. They had five children: four daughters and one son.

Short Stories (1942-1960)

• "A Piece of Cake" (published as "Shot Down Over Libya," 1942)
• The Gremlins (1943)
• Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying (1946)
• Sometime Never: A Fable for Superman (1948)
• Someone Like You (1953)
• Kiss Kiss (1960)

Dahl’s writing career began in 1942 with his wartime story. Originally, he wrote it with the title “A Piece of Cake,” and it was bought by The Saturday Evening Post for the substantial sum of $1,000. In order to be more dramatic for war propaganda purposes, however, it was renamed “Shot Down Over Libya,” even though Dahl had not, in fact, been shot down, let alone over Libya. His other major contribution to the war effort was The Gremlins , his first work for children. Originally, it was optioned by Walt Disney for an animated film , but a variety of production obstacles (problems with ensuring the rights to the idea of “gremlins” were open, issues with creative control and RAF involvement) led to the project’s eventual abandonment.

As the war came to an end, he kicked off a career writing short stories, mostly for adults and mostly published originally in a variety of American magazines. In the waning years of the war, many of his short stories remained focused on the war, the war effort, and propaganda for the Allies. First published in 1944 in Harper’s Bazaar , “Beware of the Dog” became one of Dahl’s most successful war stories and eventually was loosely adapted into two different movies.

In 1946, Dahl published his first short story collection. Entitled Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying , the collection includes most of his war-era short stories . They’re notably different from the more famous works he’d later write; these stories were clearly rooted in the wartime setting and were more realistic and less quirky. He also tackled his first (of what would only be two) adult novels in 1948. Some Time Never: A Fable for Supermen was a work of dark speculative fiction, combining the premise of his children’s story The Gremlins with a dystopian future imagining worldwide nuclear war. It was largely a failure and has never been reprinted in English. Dahl returned to short stories, publishing two consecutive short story collections: Someone Like You in 1953 and Kiss Kiss in 1960.

Family Struggles and Children’s Stories (1960-1980)

• James and the Giant Peach (1961)
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
• The Magic Finger (1966)
• Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl (1969)
• Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970)
• Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972)
• Switch Bitch (1974)
• Danny the Champion of the World (1975)
• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (1978)
• The Enormous Crocodile (1978)
• The Best of Roald Dahl (1978)
• My Uncle Oswald (1979)
• Tales of the Unexpected (1979)
• The Twits (1980)
• More Tales of the Unexpected (1980)

The beginning of the decade included some devastating events for Dahl and his family. In 1960, his son Theo’s baby carriage was hit by a car, and Theo nearly died. He suffered from hydrocephalus, so Dahl collaborated with engineer Stanley Wade and neurosurgeon Kenneth Till to invent a valve that could be used to improve treatment. Less than two years later, Dahl's daughter, Olivia, died at age seven from measles encephalitis. As a result, Dahl became a staunch proponent of vaccinations and he also began questioning his faith—a well-known anecdote explained that Dahl was dismayed at an archbishop’s remark that Olivia’s beloved dog could not join her in heaven and began questioning whether or not the Church really was so infallible. In 1965, his wife Patricia suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms during her fifth pregnancy, requiring her to relearn basic skills like walking and talking; she did recover and eventually returned to her acting career.

Meanwhile, Dahl was becoming more and more involved in writing novels for children. James and the Giant Peach , published in 1961, became his first iconic children’s book, and the decade saw several more publications that would go on to endure for years. His 1964 novel, though, would be arguably his most famous: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . The book received two film adaptations, one in 1971 and one in 2005, and a sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator , in 1972. In 1970, Dahl published The Fantastic Mr. Fox , another of his more famous children’s stories.

During this time, Dahl continued to turn out short story collections for adults as well. Between 1960 and 1980, Dahl published eight short story collections, including two “best of” style collections. My Uncle Oswald , published in 1979, was a novel using the same character of the lecherous “Uncle Oswald” who featured in a few of his earlier short stories for adults. He also continuously published new novels for children, which soon surpassed the success of his adult works. In the 1960s, he also briefly worked as a screenwriter, most notably adapting two Ian Fleming novels into films: the James Bond caper You Only Live Twice and the children’s movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang .

Later Stories for Both Audiences (1980-1990)

• George's Marvelous Medicine (1981)
• The BFG (1982)
• The Witches (1983)
• The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (1985)
• Two Fables (1986)
• Matilda (1988)
• Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life: The Country Stories of Roald Dahl (1989)
• Esio Trot (1990)
• The Vicar of Nibbleswick (1991)
• The Minpins (1991)

By the early 1980s, Dahl’s marriage to Neal was falling apart. They divorced in 1983, and Dahl remarried that same year to Felicity d’Abreu Crosland, an ex-girlfriend. Around the same time, he caused some controversy with his remarks centered on Tony Clifton's picture book  God Cried , which depicted the siege of West Beirut by Israel during the 1982 Lebanon War. His comments at the time were widely interpreted as antisemitic , although others in his circle interpreted his anti-Israel comments as non-malicious and more targeted at the conflicts with Israel.

Among his most famous later stories are 1982’s The BFG and 1988’s Matilda . The latter book was adapted into a much-beloved film in 1996, as well as an acclaimed stage musical in 2010 on the West End and 2013 on Broadway. The last book released while Dahl was still alive was Esio Trot , a surprisingly sweet children’s novel about a lonely old man trying to connect with a woman he has fallen in love with from afar.

Literary Styles and Themes

Dahl was far and away best known for his very particular and unique approach to children’s literature . Certain elements in his books are easily traced to his ugly experiences at boarding school during his youth: villainous, terrifying adults in positions of power who hate children, precocious and observant children as protagonists and narrators, school settings, and plenty of imagination. Although the boogeymen of Dahl’s childhood certainly made plenty of appearances—and, crucially, were always defeated by the children—he also tended to write token “good” adults as well.

Despite being famous for writing for children, Dahl’s sense of style is famously a unique hybrid of the whimsical and the gleefully macabre. It’s a distinctively child-centric approach, but one with a subversive undertone to its obvious warmth. The details of his antagonists’ villainy are often described in childlike but nightmarish detail, and the comic threads in stories such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are laced with dark or even violent moments. Gluttony is a particular target for Dahl’s sharply violent retribution, with several notably fat characters in his canon receiving disturbing or violent ends.

Dahl’s language is notable for its playful style and intentional malapropisms . His books are littered with new words of his own invention, often created by switching around letters or mix-and-matching existing sounds to make words that still made sense, even though they weren’t real words. In 2016, for the centenary of Dahl's birth, lexicographer Susan Rennie created  The Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary , a guide to his invented words and their “translations” or meanings.

Near the end of his life, Dahl was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare cancer of the blood, typically affecting older patients, that occurs when blood cells do not “mature” into healthy blood cells. Roald Dahl died on November 23, 1990, in Oxford, England. He was buried at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Great Missenden, in Buckinghamshire, England, in a fittingly unusual fashion: he was buried with some chocolates and wine, pencils, his favorite pool cues, and a power saw. To this day, his grave remains a popular site, where children and adults alike pay tribute by leaving flowers and toys.

Dahl’s legacy largely dwells in the enduring power of his children’s books. Several of his most famous works have been adapted into several different media, from film and television to radio to stage. It’s not just his literary contributions that have continued to have an impact, though. After his death, his widow Felicity continued his charitable work through the Roald Dahl Marvellous Children’s Charity, which supports children with various illnesses throughout the UK. In 2008, the UK charity Booktrust and Children's Laureate Michael Rosen joined forces to create The Roald Dahl Funny Prize, awarded annually to authors of humorous children's fiction. Dahl’s particular brand of humor and his sophisticated yet approachable voice for children’s fiction have left an indelible mark.

• Boothroyd, Jennifer.  Roald Dahl: A Life of Imagination . Lerner Publications, 2008.
• Shavick, Andrea.  Roald Dahl: The Champion Storyteller . Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Sturrock, Donald.  Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl , Simon & Schuster, 2010.
• Biography of William Golding, British Novelist
• Biography of C.S. Lewis, British Writer
• Biography of Aldous Huxley, British Author, Philosopher, Screenwriter
• Biography of Henry Miller, Novelist
• Biography of Mary Shelley, English Novelist, Author of 'Frankenstein'
• Biography of Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-American Novelist
• Virginia Woolf Biography
• Biography of Chinua Achebe, Author of "Things Fall Apart"
• Biography of Joseph Conrad, Author of Heart of Darkness
• Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Biography of Charles Dickens, English Novelist
• Biography of George Eliot, English Novelist
• The Life and Works of Honoré de Balzac, French Novelist
• Biography of Herman Melville, American Novelist
• Biography of James Joyce, Influential Irish Novelist
• Biography of Samuel Beckett, Irish Novelist, Playwright, and Poet

Biography Online

Roald Dahl Biography

Roald Dahl – (13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a best selling British children’s author and a flying ace in the Second World War.

Short Bio Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl was born in 1916, Cardiff to Norwegian parents. At a young age, his father passed away, and Roald was sent to boarding schools in England. His childhood years left a lasting impression on Roald, and he later serialised these in his autobiography – Boy .

These times were generally unhappy for Roald; he recounts the excessive strictness, corporal punishment and fear amongst the boys. The brutal canning meted out to boys by both staff, and ‘prefects’ particularly stuck in the mind of the young Dahl.

“All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed quite literally to wound other boys, and sometimes very severely.” Roald Dahl

He recounted the fear and pain in great detail. He also mentioned a friend who was flogged – by the then headmaster of Repton, leaving a trail of blood. Roald wrote this headmaster went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury and this is one incident that turned him away from religion and God.

Roald Dahl never really fitted in with the public school ethos of discipline and fags. Fags were young boys who would serve elder prefects – for example, Roald wryly wrote how he was chosen to be the favoured ‘bog warmer’ of his prefect. – His job was to sit on an outside toilet to warm it up for his prefect. Despite excelling at sports, Roald later turned down the opportunity to be a prefect as he admitted he could not agree with the general principles.

The only glimpses of happiness were in the school holidays when he visited the beautiful Norwegian Fjords of his parents’ homeland and also towards the end of his school career when he got his first motorbike.

On leaving school, Roald got a job with Shell Petroleum company and in 1934 he was transferred to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. He enjoyed his job and made good progress. However, on the outbreak of war in August 1939, he soon joined the Royal Air Force and became a fighter ace. He gained little training in an old Tiger Moth before being flung into brutal dogfights.

On an early flying mission, Roald Dahl crashed on route to Egypt. He was badly injured and was blinded for several weeks. By February 1941, he was discharged from hospital and was transferred to the Greek Campaign. This was a fight against overwhelming odds as the British forces were outnumbered with only a few aircraft to defend against the German invasion. Roald Dahl was one of the few airmen to survive the bitter dog fighting and was evacuated to Egypt before the fall of Athens. During that time he shot down numerous enemy aircraft, though the exact number was difficult to ascertain. His official figure was confirmed as 5, though this was likely to be more.

After a medical condition, Dahl was invalided back to Britain. For the remainder of the war, he was given a job writing propaganda for the allies. He also supplied intelligence to the British Security Coordination which was part of MI6.

After the war, Dahl began to concentrate more on writing as a career. His first successful story was an account of his crash in Egypt – “A Piece of Cake” – initially published as “Shot down over Libya”. This led to his first children’s book – Gremlins, commissioned by Walt Disney.

He went on to create some of the most memorable children’s books. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda . They set a new tone for children’s books. They often featured a dark sense of humour, grave injustice and grotesque figures (often fat e.g. Augustus Gloop, Bruce Bogtrotter).

“Fairy tales have always got to have something a bit scary for children – as long as you make them laugh as well.” – Roald Dahl

Using elements of semi-autobiography his stories often featured a divide between one or two good people against people who were abusing their positions of power. In books such as Danny The Champion of the World , he introduces elements of class conflict and the triumph of the underdog. His books often had unexpected endings.

In the 1960s, Dahl acquired an old-fashioned gypsy caravan which he parked in his garden where he lived in Great Missenden, Oxfordshire. He used this caravan to write some of his children’s books.

He also wrote short adult short stories, and in the 1960s he also wrote two successful screenplays – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the James Bond film – You Only Live Twice. But, it is primarily for his best selling children’s books that he is remembered. In a poll commissioned by Canon UK, Canon was considered Britain’s greatest storyteller – above both Dickens and J.K.Rowling.

He married Patricia Neal on 2 July 1953 in New York. They had five children during their 30-year marriage.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Roald Dahl “, Oxford, UK www.biographyonline.net , 22nd Jan. 2010. Last updated 18 February 2018.

Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl

Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl at Amazon

Related pages

• World Biography

Roald Dahl Biography

Born: September 13, 1916 Llandaff, South Wales Died: November 23, 1990 Oxford, England Welsh author

A writer of both children's fiction and short stories for adults, Roald Dahl is best known as the author of the 1964 children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (he also wrote the script for the 1971 movie version). Dahl has been described as a master of story construction with a remarkable ability to weave a tale.

A young troublemaker

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."

The birth of a writer

After 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.

Inspired by his children

In 1953 Dahl married Hollywood actress Patricia Neal, star of such movies as The Fountainhead and, later, Hud, for which she won an Academy Award. Although the marriage did not survive, it produced five children. As soon as the children were old enough, Dahl began making up stories for them each night before they went to bed. These stories became the basis for his career as a children's writer, which began seriously with the publication of James and the Giant Peach in 1961. It tells the fantastic tale of a young boy who travels thousands of miles in a house-sized peach with as strange a group of companions as can be found in a children's book. Dahl insisted that having to invent stories night after night was perfect practice for his trade, telling the New York Times Book Review : "Children are … highly critical. And they lose interest so quickly. You have to keep things ticking along. And if you think a child is getting bored, you must think up something that jolts it back. Something that tickles. You have to know what children like."

Controversy

One way that Dahl delighted his readers was to take often vicious revenge on cruel adults who had harmed children, as in Matilda (1988). But even some innocent adults received rough treatment, such as the parents killed in a car crash in The Witches (1983). Many critics have objected to the rough treatment of adults. However, Dahl explained in the New York Times Book Review that the children who wrote to him always "pick out the most gruesome events as the favorite parts of the books.… They don't relate it to life. They enjoy the fantasy." He also said that his "nastiness" was payback. "Beastly people must be punished."

In Trust Your Children: Voices Against Censorship in Children's Literature, Dahl said that adults may be disturbed by his books "because they are not quite as aware as I am that children are different from adults. Children are much more vulgar than grownups. They have a coarser sense of humor. They are basically more cruel." Dahl often commented that the key to his success with children was that he joined with them against adults.

"The writer for children must be a jokey sort of a fellow," Dahl once told Writer. "He must like simple tricks and jokes and riddles and other childish things. He must be … inventive. He must have a really first-class plot."

Why a writer?

Dahl's children's fiction is known for its sudden turns into the fantastic, its fast-moving pace, and its decidedly harsh treatment of any adults foolish enough to cause trouble for the young heroes and heroines. Similarly, his adult fiction often relied on a sudden twist that threw light on what had been happening in the story.

Looking back on his years as a writer in Boy: Tales of Childhood, Dahl contended that "two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock.… A person is a fool to become a writer. His only [reward] is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it."

Roald Dahl died in Oxford, England, on November 23, 1990.

For More Information

Dahl, Roald. Boy: Tales of Childhood. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1984.

Dahl, Roald. Going Solo. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1986.

Dahl, Roald. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. New York: Knopf, 1977.

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic:.

About Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl was a spy, ace fighter pilot, chocolate historian and medical inventor. His first moment of inspiration came when he was at boarding school, when a local chocolate factory invited pupils to trial new chocolate bars - 35 years later, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published.

He went on to write many more stories, including Matilda, James and the Giant Peach and Fantastic Mr Fox, all from a hut in his back garden in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. By the time he published The Minpins, he had written a total of 16 stories for children, which have been translated into 68 languages and read all over the world. He remains one of the world's greatest storytellers.

The Roald Dahl Story Company protects and grows the cultural value of Roald Dahl stories with their unique breadth of characters and worlds. With 300 million books sold, and one new book sold every 2.5 seconds, the Roald Dahl brand continues to grow in popularity globally, attracting new audiences with innovative developments in book, theatre, entertainment and beyond.

The Roald Dahl Story Company is committed to sharing the positive messages at the heart of all Roald Dahl stories - messages of the strength and potential of young people, and the power of kindness.

Find out more about Roald Dahl stories Apology for antisemitic comments made by Roald Dahl

Are you sure you really want to leave us?

You are going to:

Please note: The Roald Dahl Story Company is not responsible for the content of external sites.

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Author Interviews

Roald dahl: the story of the 'storyteller'.

Roald Dahl in his writing hut. He used the hut as a place to escape and reconnect with his inner child. The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre hide caption

Roald Dahl in his writing hut. He used the hut as a place to escape and reconnect with his inner child.

Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl By Donald Sturrock Hardcover, 672 pages Simon & Schuster List price: $30

Read An Excerpt

Roald Dahl is best known for his children's stories.  His first -- and arguably his most famous -- was James and the Giant Peach , published in 1961, when Dahl was already in his mid-40s.

But prior to finding his calling as a children's author, Dahl tried out several other careers -- as an oilman for Shell, a pilot in Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) and a member of the British diplomatic corps.

Perhaps one of the most interesting periods in Dahl's life -- and one that demonstrates his considerable charm -- was during World War II. Early in the war, Dahl spent several years living in the United States, trying to raise awareness for the British war cause. Donald Sturrock, author of Storyteller , a new biography of Dahl, tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer just how successful Dahl was in this endeavor.

"It was a dizzying ride to the top of Washington, New York and L.A. society," he says. "Dahl's mission was to conquer American society, which he did with a series of speeches about what it was like to be a RAF man."

Dahl's writing career took off here, too.  While in America, he wrote a short piece of fiction about gremlins -- the mythical creatures that cause problems with RAF airplanes.  The story became very popular and received a tremendous amount of attention.  A copy sent to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt charmed her enough that she invited Dahl to the White House.  Walt Disney also fell under the gremlins' spell and flew Dahl to Hollywood to discuss making a movie.

Dahl's gremlins never made it into a movie, but they did make it into a book, which Sturrock says may have helped in promoting a positive image of Britain and the RAF to wartime America.

Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal on their Rome honeymoon in 1953. The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre hide caption

Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal on their Rome honeymoon in 1953.

Dahl would capture America's attention again in 1952, when he married actress Patricia Neal, who later won an Oscar for her performance with Paul Newman in Hud . Although the marriage almost failed in the first few months, Sturrock says it eventually became one of great strength.

"Pat and Roald were bound together by these two tragedies that happened quite early on with their children," he explains. "Their son Theo was knocked over and crushed against the side of a bus by a cab in New York, and secondly when their eldest daughter, Olivia, died, aged only 7, from complications resulting from measles."

Neal would also suffer an aneurysm and a series of strokes, which caused her to lose the use of one side of her body and made speech very difficult. Dahl worked out an intensely rigorous rehabilitation therapy for her that, to many, seemed almost cruel.

But, Sturrock says, what Dahl did was very pioneering at that time.

"It's almost become standard practice, his idea that you must stimulate a stroke victim quite early on and quite extremely in order to get them back to health," he explains.

Dahl worked hard to help Neal recover and, although it was a very painful process for her, she was extremely grateful to him, especially given that she was able to return to her acting career within only a few years.

Dahl, the storyteller, reads to a group of enthralled children. The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre hide caption

Dahl, the storyteller, reads to a group of enthralled children.

Neal's acting career, and then her illness, meant that Dahl assumed many of the domestic responsibilities -- taking care of the house and the children.  But to focus on his writing, Dahl needed a more private place.   He would often retire to a small work hut -- his writing hut -- where he could indulge his love of fantasy and escape from reality.

Dahl himself told Sturrock that the hut helped him think like a child.

"I can cut myself off there," Dahl said, "...and within minutes become six and seven and eight again."

That, says Sturrock, was Dahl's most special gift -- he truly understood children.  "He had an extraordinary confidence about his ability to see into a child's mind and to see the world the way a child saw it."

Excerpt: 'Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl'

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Agriculture
• Armed forces and intelligence services
• Art and architecture
• Business and finance
• Education and scholarship
• Individuals
• Law and crime
• Manufacture and trade
• Media and performing arts
• Medicine and health
• Religion and belief
• Royalty, rulers, and aristocracy
• Science and technology
• Social welfare and reform
• Sports, games, and pastimes
• Travel and exploration
• Writing and publishing
• Christianity
• Share Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Dahl, roald.

• Philip Howard
• https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/39827
• Published in print: 23 September 2004
• Published online: 23 September 2004
• This version: 01 September 2017
• Previous version

Roald Dahl ( 1916–1990 )

by Dumant , 1971

Dahl, Roald ( 1916–1990 ), writer of fiction , was born on 13 September 1916 at Villa Marie, Fairwater Road, Llandaff, Glamorgan, the son of Harald Dahl , shipbroker, and his second wife, Sofie Magdalene , daughter of Olaf Hesselberg , meteorologist and classical scholar. His parents were prosperous Norwegians. His father had given up farming near Oslo, and settled with his wife and two small children (a son and a daughter) in Wales, where he made a fortune as a shipbroker. When his first wife died suddenly, he married Sofie Hesselberg . She took on the existing family, and had four children of her own. Roald , her only son, was her third child, later nicknamed the Apple . One of his older sisters married the microbiologist Sir Ashley Miles .

When Dahl was only three another beloved, older sister and his father died within two months of one another. This was the first in a series of catastrophes and mortal disasters that dogged his life, and, he claimed, gave his work a black savagery. His mother, a devoted matriarch, ran the family. In the summers she took them to Norway, where her family fostered Dahl's interest in insects and birds, Nordic trolls, and witches. She gave Dahl his passion for reading—in particular Galsworthy , Kipling , and Hugh Walpole —all best-sellers of the day. She was immortalized as the grandmother in The Witches (1983).

Dahl was an undistinguished rebel at Llandaff Cathedral school, St Peter's in Weston-super-Mare, and Repton School. Those few of his contemporaries who remembered him remarked only on his bullying humour and competitive spirit, and his hatred of authority. His proudest achievement was to invent a mousetrap that plunged its victims into a bowl of water, with the Dahlian logo, 'catch as cats can't'. In his account of his childhood, Boy (1984), he revealed the cruel flogging pleasurably inflicted by Repton's headmaster, G. F. Fisher (later archbishop of Canterbury). Dahl claimed that the hypocrisy of his headmaster's brutal beatings followed by pious sermons in Repton chapel cured him of any inclination towards Christianity. Dahl described his ferocious beatings in clinical detail in his story 'Lucky Break' .

War service

Resisting the attractions of a university education, at eighteen Dahl joined the Public Schools Exploring Society's expedition to Newfoundland. He joined Shell in 1934, and was sent to Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, he drove to Nairobi, Kenya, to volunteer for the Royal Air Force . Learning to fly over the Kenyan highlands was a master experience, and provided aerial images both magical and nightmarish for his subsequent writing. He served with 80 fighter squadron in the western desert in 1940, and was severely wounded when his Gloster Gladiator biplane ran out of petrol and crash-landed in the Libyan desert. His injuries never left him, and he later converted the pain and frustration of his crash and seven months in hospital into fantasies in the style of Biggles. He declined convalescent leave in Britain, and fought in the hopeless air defences over Athens and then the Peloponnese. Invalided home to London, he was posted to Washington as assistant air attaché (1942–3) and worked in security (1943–5). He was appointed flight lieutenant in 1943—not wing commander, as he claimed in Who's Who . While Dahl was in Washington, C. S. Forester —creator of Captain Hornblower and author of many popular novels—asked him for RAF anecdotes to be used as propaganda. He sent Dahl's romanticized version of his plane crash to the Saturday Evening Post , where it appeared in 1942 under the misleading title 'Shot down over Libya: an RAF pilot's factual account' . In it Dahl informed his readers that his Hurricane had been brought down in flames by a burst of machine-gun fire while strafing a column of trucks. His stories in the Saturday Evening Post marked the beginning of Dahl's accidental but prodigious career as a writer.

Disney tried to make a film of one of Dahl's stories called 'The Gremlins' (1943), which concerned a tribe of goblins who were blamed by the RAF for everything that went wrong with an aircraft. Gremlin stories were rife in the RAF at the time, and several other books about them had already appeared, but Dahl was happy to boast that he had invented them. 'The Gremlins' was such a success that the self-dramatizing RAF hero became a frequent guest of Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House and their weekend retreat, Hyde Park. This entrée was exploited by the British intelligence services, who made him a spy—on the Americans. Or so Dahl later claimed.

Tales of the Unexpected

Dahl's short stories, published in such distinguished notice-boards of the genre as the New Yorker and Harper's Magazine , tiptoed along the tightrope between the macabre and the comic in a manner reminiscent of Hector Hugh Munro (Saki) . They were horrific, fantastic, and unbelievable. Lapsed vegetarians do not commonly find themselves being slit up for sausage-meat in a homely abattoir, nor do babies fed on royal jelly turn into bees. In a typical Dahl story a woman clubs her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb and then feeds it to the detectives who have come to search for the murder weapon, or a rich woman goes on a cruise, leaving her husband to perish in an elevator stuck between two floors in an empty house. When the stories were published as collections, Someone Like You (1953, revised 1961) and Kiss, Kiss (1960), Dahl broke through into the best-seller lists and became a celebrity. His popular fame was augmented by the translation of his ripping yarns to the small screen in Alfred Hitchcock Presents from 1965 onwards, and then in Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected , which ran on television around the world for many years from 1979 onwards. Preoccupied as they are with greed, revenge, cruelty, and the rest of the dark side of human nature, his stories were both bizarre examples and also trendsetters of the fashionable 1960s genre of black comedy. Not a few critics denounced his work as sadistic, antisocial, and misogynist. But Saki would have recognized his combination of the macabre with fantasy and wit.

On 2 July 1953 Dahl married the film star Patricia Neal (1926–2010) , who was on the rebound from her long affair with Gary Cooper . She was the daughter of William Burdett Neal , manager of the Southern Coal and Coke Company , of Packard, Kentucky. They had one son and four daughters. Their son Theo was brain-damaged at the age of four months when he was tipped out of his pram in New York and fell under a cab. His skull was smashed and he was not expected to live. But working with his consultant and a friend who was an aircraft designer of hydraulic pumps, Dahl pioneered the Wade-Dahl-Till Valve. This non-blocking valve drains fluid from the brain, and has since been used to treat thousands of children with brain injuries. Ultimately, after years of desperate illness, Theo did recover. Meanwhile his older sister Olivia contracted a rare form of measles aged seven and died of encephalitis.

Children's fiction

Dahl now turned to writing books for children—claiming, implausibly, that he had run out of plots for adult Gothic horror. James and the Giant Peach (1967) was spotted as an instant new planet in the sky of children's fiction. The story begins with James's parents being eaten by a runaway rhino on a crowded shopping street, an opening that Evelyn Waugh would have cheered. The story tells how the orphan James escapes the guardianship of two monstrous aunts, the wicked Aunt Spiker and the dastardly Aunt Sponge. One day 'this disgusting beast', 'this filthy nuisance' (the aunts never call James by his real name) spills a bag of magic worms ( 'Miserable creature!' ) near the roots of a peach tree. A peach swells to enormous proportions and James goes to live inside it. With a set of lovable and resourceful insects as crew, James and the giant peach roll, float, and fly from darkest rural England over the Atlantic to a ticker-tape reception in New York, squashing the aunts as flat as pancakes en route . It is rude, naughty, anti-adult, creepy, and sometimes cruel. The Giant Peach had a successful run as an opera at Covent Garden.

James and the Giant Peach was followed in the same year by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (filmed in 1971 as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory ), the most popular children's book yet. This established the tricks of Dahl's magic trade and attraction. Its hero, Charlie Bucket, is the poorest boy imaginable (one bar of chocolate a year and two helpings of cabbage as a special treat on Sundays). His four grandparents, all over ninety, 'as shrivelled as prunes and as bony as skeletons', lie huddled and hungry in their one bed, 'two at either end dozing away the time with nothing to do'. But Charlie's visit to the mysterious Wonka chocolate factory, a children's utopia of mint grass and chocolate rivers, changes the Bucket family fortunes. Mr Willy Wonka, the imperious chocolate wizard, is looking for a protégé he can trust. He disposes of Charlie's rivals (greedy Augustus Gloop, disobedient Violet Beauregarde, spoilt Veruca Salt, brash Mike Teevee) and chooses skinny, wide-eyed Charlie as the heir to his secret recipes—which include sugar-coated pencils for sucking, luminous lollies for eating in bed, and stickjaw for talkative parents. So the underdog triumphs, as usual with Dahl . His dialogue smacks of Carroll , and his verses of Belloc . A stock topic of Dahl's was to pick on human weaknesses and vices, such as gluttony, bossiness, or untidiness, and invite his young readers to rejoice in the sticky end to which their possessors come. These first children's books also flaunt the cheeky vocabulary, the zany pathos, the funniness, and the undisciplined plotting that were the penprints of Dahl . An eminent American critic called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 'cheap, tasteless, ugly, sadistic, and for all these reasons, harmful' ( Treglown , 188 ); and an English headmaster doing research into children's reading charged Dahl with 'incipient fascism' (as opposed to the 'paternalist feudalism' of Enid Blyton ). Even Margaret Meek , the distinguished authority on children's books, commented primly: 'I do not trust Dahl as implicitly as his young readers do, because I find his view of life seriously flawed by a particular kind of intolerance.'

Dahl claimed that the secret of his success as a writer for children was that he appealed to their baser instincts:

When you are born you are a savage, an uncivilised little grub, and if you are going to go into our society by the age of ten, then you have to have good manners and know all the do's and don'ts—don't eat with your fingers and don't piss on the floor. All that stuff has to be hammered into the savage, who resents it deeply. So subconsciously in the child's mind these giants become the enemy. That goes particularly for parents and teachers. The Times , 30 Nov 1990

Not all teachers, parents, and librarians were as keen as their children on Dahl , especially in the United States. He was accused of violent exaggerations of language and grotesque characterizations. To his detractors Dahl was capricious (most adults are portrayed as cruel monsters); racist (the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were black pygmy slaves before Dahl gave them long hair and rosy skin in a prudently revised edition); rude (a whole chapter in The BFG [Big Friendly Giant] is devoted to the joys of farting); and misogynist (James's aunts, Sponge and Spiker, are 'ghastly hags'; Matilda's headmistress, Miss Agatha Trunchbull, treats her pupils with extreme violence and grievous bodily harm). 'Real witches dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. In fact, they look just like your schoolteacher or respectable aunt. But secretly they are bald, their spit is as blue as bilberry, and to them little boys smell of dogs' droppings, FRESH dogs' droppings.' The Witches (1983) was placed on the restricted list in many American schools, after parents complained that it either frightened their children or encouraged them to take an interest in the occult. Beneath Dahl's robust caricature, simple morality, and rich comic invention, critics detected an undercurrent of vengeful sadism and black misanthropy.

In spite of high-minded disapproval, Dahl's books were hugely popular with children. They were inventive, rich, imaginative, surprising, funny, and full of the bizarre words that please children. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, several of them continually topped the best-seller lists both in the UK and abroad. When the first edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in China, it had a print run of two million, the biggest print run of any book to date. By the end of the twentieth century the sales of his eighteen children's titles totalled well over 35 million books. They included Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1973), Danny, the Champion of the World (1975), The Enormous Crocodile (1978), The Twits (1980), George's Marvellous Medicine (1981), The BFG (a Big Friendly Giant who kidnaps a girl from an orphanage and deposits her in the queen's bedroom, 'with the Queen herself asleep in there behind the curtain not more than five yards away') and Revolting Rhymes (both 1982), The Witches (1983), Matilda (1988), and The Vicar of Nibbleswicke and The Minpins , both published posthumously (1991).

Family, character, and assessment

While pregnant with their fifth child, Patricia Neal suffered a series of massive strokes. Again Dahl refused to accept the grim prognosis. He set about bringing her back into the world with a determination that shocked onlookers by its brutality and ruthlessness. She was helped through her long recovery by Dahl until she was well enough to resume acting. Some said that he humiliated her by treating her like a child, and bullied her back into health with force and even sadism. Dahl not only recreated his wife. He ran his household, adored his children, planned the garden, wrote screenplays (unsuccessfully), and continued to produce stories. Dahl then divorced Neal in 1983 and on 15 December the same year married her best friend and his long-time mistress, Felicity Ann Crosland , former wife of Charles Reginald Hugh Crosland , businessman and farmer, and daughter of Alphonsus Liguori d'Abreu , thoracic surgeon, of Birmingham. They lived with their eight children of previous marriages at Gipsy House, Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. There Dahl wrote, always in pencil, in a hut in the garden.

Dahl published two volumes of autobiography, Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984) and Going Solo (1986). He wrote several scripts for films, among them the James Bond adventure You Only Live Twice (1967) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). He was as scornful of the men in suits who run Hollywood studios as Scott Fitzgerald and P. G. Wodehouse . He was a publisher's nightmare. The president of Alfred Knopf described his manner as 'unmatched in my experience for overbearingness and utter lack of civility' ( Treglown , 215 ). He refused a request from his editor to tone down The Witches on the grounds that he was 'not as frightened of offending women as you are' ( ibid., 225 ). He denounced Salman Rushdie under sentence of death by the Islamic fatwa as 'a dangerous opportunist' ( The Times , 28 Feb 1989 ). And he accused the Jews of cowardice in the Second World War for not doing more to resist the Nazis. He told a reporter in 1983 that 'there is a streak in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity' ( Treglown , 237 ), and declared that even a miserable man such as Hitler did not single them out for nothing. Invited to review God Cried , an account of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, he launched a headlong attack on all Israelis, and to many it appeared an attack on Jews.

By the end of his life Dahl was bitter at not receiving the knighthood that he felt he deserved, and he became increasingly self-important, ordering a Rolls-Royce from his publisher's to collect manuscripts from his home. He was 6 feet 6 inches tall, a chain-smoker, a lover of fine wine, a collector of contemporary painting, a grower of roses and orchids, a picture restorer, and a gambler on horses. He looked after 100 budgerigars that flew wild around his garden. He was a chocaholic. In the garden hut where he wrote he kept a huge silver ball made by packing together the silver paper from all the chocolate bars he ate. He also kept there as a trophy to show visitors one of his arthritic hip bones which had been replaced.

Dahl's public statements were often intemperate. Some of his stories about himself were as tall as he was, and as fantastical as his fictions. But he had a magical touch for the macabre and the surrealist. The pied piper and lord of misrule of topsy-turvydom was the most popular children's writer of his or any age. Generations of children grew up with Dahl's books, and were able to enjoy reading them to their own children. They were translated into innumerable languages, filmed, and televised. Their saturnine author replied in rhyme to schoolchildren's fan mail:

Oh wondrous children miles away Your letters brightened up my day.

Treglown, 294 He adored children, and they loved the grotesque worlds he created for them. His attachment to his family was the one consistency in a life of contradictions. His first wife remarked cynically that 'he had an enormous appreciation for anything he generated'. His personal tale of the unexpected was that his story-telling talent sprang from tragedy and bile. Shortly before he died, he said: 'I don't think you find many chaps or women in their mid-seventies who think like I do, and joke and fart around. They usually grow pompous, and pomposity is the enemy of children's writing' ( The Times , 30 Nov 1990 ). The key to his success, he frequently said, was to conspire with children against adults. He died of leukaemia on 23 November 1990 at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, and was buried on 29 November at Great Missenden parish church. He was survived by his wife Felicity , his former wife Patricia Neal , and four of his children. In 2005 the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre was opened at 81–3 High Street, Great Missenden.

• R. Dahl, Boy (1984)
• R. Dahl, Going solo (1986)
• R. Dahl, A sweet mystery of life (1989)
• B. Farrell, Pat and Roald (1970)
• J. Treglown, Roald Dahl : a biography (1994)
• personal knowledge (2004)
• private information (2004)
• m. cert. [Felicity Ann Crosland]
• Dumant, photograph, 1971, Hult. Arch. [see illus.]
• J. Benton-Harris, double portrait, bromide print, 1976 (with Patricia Neal), NPG
• S. Hyde, resin print, 1982, NPG
• J. Baldwin, cibachrome print, 1989, NPG
• S. Karadia, photograph, repro. in The Times (24 Nov 1990)
• S. Karadia, photograph, repro. in The Times (30 Nov 1990)
• oils, priv. coll.
• photograph, repro. in The Times (24 Nov 1990)

Wealth at Death

£2,843,217: probate, 13 Feb 1991, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

View the article for this person in the Dictionary of National Biography archive edition .

More on this topic

• Dahl, Roald, (13 Sept. 1916–23 Nov. 1990), writer in Who Was Who

External resources

• Bibliography of British and Irish history
• National Portrait Gallery
• National Archives
• Poetry Archive
• BBC, Desert Island Discs
• Royal Academy

Printed from Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 25 October 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [66.249.64.20|185.126.86.119]
• 185.126.86.119

Character limit 500 /500

• DIGITAL MAGAZINE

MOST POPULAR

13 phizz-whizzing facts about Roald Dahl

We’ve put together some fantastic facts about roald dahl’s life, and boy are there some humdingers….

13th September 2020 marks what would have been Roald Dahl’s 104th birthday!

To celebrate all the brilliant books , playful poems and witty words he gave us over the years, we’ve put together some fantastic facts about the author’s life, and boy are there some humdingers…

Did you know that we have a FREE downloadable Roald Dahl primary resource ? Great for teachers, homeschoolers and parents alike!

Roald Dahl facts

1. dahl wrote many of his stories in a little shed at the bottom of his garden.

Known as his ‘writing hut’, Dahl sat in a battered old armchair and penned famous tales such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory .

2. He was a fighter pilot in World War II 

During a flight in a Gloster Gladiator (fighter plane) in 1940 over Libya, Dahl crash landed in the desert and survived – all because he’d been given the wrong directions!

3. Dahl wrote for around four hours every single day

From 10am – 12pm, and then 4pm – 6pm

4. He never learned how to type

Instead, Dahl preferred to do all his writing in an old red book in pencil.

5. When Roald Dahl died in 1990, he was buried with some of his favourite things

Including a power drill, chocolate, snooker cues and of course, his HB pencils.

6. There are strange mementos still sitting in his writing hut

These include a huge ball made of old chocolate wrappers, and a piece of hip bone that he had to have removed!

Quentin Blake illustrated many of Dahl’s much loved books over the years.

7. dahl was a spy.

During World War II he passed intelligence to MI6 from Washington.

8. Dahl invented over 250 new words

There’s even an official Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary to help you tell your snozzcumbers from your snozzberries.

9. Many of Dahl’s characters were based on people he’d met in real life

The grandmother in The Witches is said to be based on Dahl’s mother, and the little girl in The BFG was named after his granddaughter, Sophie. 

10. Dahl was born in Wales, but his parents were Norwegian

As a child, Roald spoke fluent Norwegian and English. He’s even named after the famous Norwegian polar explorer, Roald Amundson.

11. Writing wasn’t his strong point at school

– according to his teachers, anyway!

12. In 1971, a real man named Willy Wonka wrote to Roald Dahl

He was a postman from Nebraska.

13. Roald Dahl was a giant!

Okay, not quite like the ones in his stories, but he was 6 foot 6 inches tall! This earned him the nickname ‘Lofty’ when he served in the RAF.

Which is your favourite Roald Dahl book? Let us know by leaving a comment, below!

Leave a comment.

Your comment will be checked and approved shortly.

WELL DONE, YOUR COMMENT HAS BEEN ADDED!

Nice facts and my favourite book is... The BFG

George’s Marvellous Medicine, because it’s SO funny!

Esio Trot is my favourite, because it just is!

its very creative!

thx for the facts

I got the whole collection of Roald Dahl books yesterday, I've already read two and love them! My favourite is Matilda though!

My favorite book: The witches and Charlie and the chocolate factory

I all most read every book he has

Thank you and very interesting

i love roald dahl

The fantastic Mr fox

The Fantastic Mr Fox

Ilove reading his books so much

James and giant peach

wow i did not know that

hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii coooooooooolllllllllllllll

My favourite book was the twits

Love the info

I like this info

I love this facts but they can be shorter

I like Matilda

Thanks for the info

he is a auspicious author and i am a fan of him

Fantastic Mr.Fox !!!!

I like matilda

easy to find.

The Twits is my favorite book

My favrourite is Danny The Campion of The world so far. I found out the arthor Roald Dahl when I was in the Op-shop.

My favourite Roal Dahl book is Matilda

My dog is called Sophie my favorite is the bfg

I love Roald Dahl! Matilda is my favourite. And to think writing wasn’t his strong point at school?!

I don't have a favorite because all of them are TRULY AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I loved roald dahl's books , and I have always wanted to meet him. But sadly, he has already past away.

#1 fan roald dahl my 3 favourite books are the twits, matilda and james and the jient peach love you roald xoxoxo

We like the BFG because there are amazing twists about the story.

i love reading Roald Dahl books my fav book is the witches :) :] ps. i love you Roald Dahl

Brilliant I love his books

I love all of Roald Dahls books

the bfg is my favourite. and the little girl is called sophie because his granddaughter sophie used to call him the bfs.

#1 fan! My favourite book is Mischief and Mayham. Your the BEST Roald Dahl.

Roald Dahl is AWESOME! My favourite book is Mischief and Mayham.

My favourite book is CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY Well done Roald Dahl

I love Matilda

Love the facts

I love Roald Dahl

My favorite is Matilda because I like the adventure, the Trunchbull and her super power.

love love love thease amazing books so cool

my favourite is the BFG

I love Roald Dahl books, especially The BFG and Matilda

my favourites are probably The BFG because it is so entertaining and funny. next is Matilda because it has so much in it!

All his books are the MOST BEST BOOKS EVER

BFG because its funny and intresting

I have Roald Dahl audio books... all of them!

My favourite Roald Dahl stories are The witches and The BFG

wow that is a lot of facts about one of my fave author Roald Dahl!!!!! :)

My favourite Roald Dahl book is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - because i like chocolate, my dad doesn't like the umpa-lumpas

He is my most favourite author of all times.

I love Matilda!

bfg its awesome

I think number 12 is super cool

my favourite book is the BFG

My fav is Matilda.

Great facts

My favourite book of roald dahl is the witches because it teaches us to not go with strangers.

my favorite roald dahl book is the twits

my favourite Roald Dahl book is the BFG. Fun fact I was born in the same month as Roald Dahl...SEPTEMBER!!!

All of them and thank you for the facts

he was the greatest story teller but how did he die?

I love Roald Daul books!

Matilda is awsome

my favarrite book is the bfg

This is amazing and cool to learn facts about Ronald Dahl !.

cool facts i love it

I like the BFG because he says silly words and blows dreams i wondered where dreams came from.

i like esio trot

my favourite book is danny the champion of the world

BEST FACTS EVER!!!

Amazing Roald dahl is one of my favorite authors eve!!!!

I love Matilda.

My favourite Roald Dahl book is Georges Marvellous Medicine!

Loved his books ( especially the bfg) I knew most of these facts but the others were great to know

James and the giant peach!!!

Matilda is my favourite book

Charlie and the chocolate factory

My favourite Roald Dahl book is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Im planning to become a storyteller when I grow up.

I love the BFG!

My favourite book is the BFG

I really like the book Matilda. I like the way Dahl put the characters together. Miss Trunchbull is super freaky and cool at the same time:-)

I love the BFG because of all the hilarious words!

My favourite Roald Dahl book is Charlie and the chocolate factory because it is all about chocolate and I love chocolate.

My favourite book by Roald Dahl is the bfg

Favourite book? How can I choose just one? The BFG is wonderful but Danny the Champion of the World also holds a special place in my heart! A grown up child of 40!

Roal Dhal is an amazing author. My favorite Roal Dhal book is Matilda.

he is 100 today and i went to school first day and i did not know he died in 1990

My favourite Roald Dahl book is Matilda because it is funny and enjoyable and i love reading just like her

the twits is my fav

CUSTOMIZE YOUR AVATAR

More like books.

Kat Wolfe Takes the Case

Check Out Middle School Dog’s Best Friend!

Win magical new tale, The Night Spinner!

Sign up to our newsletter

Get uplifting news, exclusive offers, inspiring stories and activities to help you and your family explore and learn delivered straight to your inbox.

You will receive our UK newsletter. Change region

WHERE DO YOU LIVE?

COUNTRY * Australia Ireland New Zealand United Kingdom Other

By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and will receive emails from us about news, offers, activities and partner offers.

You're all signed up! Back to subscription site

Type whatever you want to search

More Results

You’re leaving natgeokids.com to visit another website!

Ask a parent or guardian to check it out first and remember to stay safe online.

You're leaving our kids' pages to visit a page for grown-ups!

Be sure to check if your parent or guardian is okay with this first.

• Listen and watch

Roald Dahl quick bio

Do you know Roald Dahl, the author of lots of great kids books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ? Find out about his life in this video!

• Do the preparation activity to help you with words from the video.
• Watch the video then play the games to check your understanding.
• You can also print the worksheets for more practice.
• Remember to read our discussion question and leave a comment!

Preparation

Little Roald was born on the 13th of September 1916. 

As a kid, he wasn't particularly known for his writing! But many of his childhood experiences came to inspire his stories years later. For instance, a chocolate maker used to taste-test their new products at Roald's school, and he used to dream of inventing a new chocolate bar! Hmm, sound familiar?

But before becoming an author, Roald Dahl was actually a fighter pilot in World War Two, and later a spy for MI6, working alongside Ian Fleming – the man who created James Bond!

Oh, hello, Ian.

Hello, Roald.

It wasn't until 1943 that Dahl put pencil to his favourite yellow paper and published his first kids' book, The Gremlins , a tale of naughty creatures that cause mechanical problems on planes! Dahl went on to write 16 other kids' books, selling more than 200 million copies worldwide.

Have you read any books by Roald Dahl? Which other books do you like? Tell us about them!

I havent finish the book 'Charlie and the Factory Choclate', but I liked the book. I read only this book. I reading a book 'Sherlok Holms and I like it.

• Log in or register to post comments

I have read Matilda (and I have watch the movie), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and I also watched the movie ), Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, The Witches, George's Marvellous Medicine, and Danny, the Champion of the World!!! :D

English courses for children aged 6-17

Sign up to our newsletter for free learning tips and resources

We will process your data to send you our newsletter and updates based on your consent. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of every email. Read our privacy policy for more information.

• Biographies & Memoirs

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Roald Dahl: Teller of the Unexpected: A Biography Hardcover – January 3, 2023

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 272 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Pegasus Books
• Publication date January 3, 2023
• Dimensions 5.5 x 1.3 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1639363327
• ISBN-13 978-1639363322
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pegasus Books (January 3, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1639363327
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1639363322
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.3 x 8.25 inches
• #1,364 in Historical British Biographies
• #3,014 in Rich & Famous Biographies
• #5,304 in Author Biographies

About the author

Matthew dennison.

Matthew Dennison is the author of nine critically acclaimed works of non-fiction, including Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, a Book of the Year in The Times, Spectator, Independent and Observer, and the much-praised Eternal Boy, a life of Kenneth Grahame, and his biography of Her late Majesty The Queen, published by Head of Zeus.

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 33% 35% 14% 18% 0% 33%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 33% 35% 14% 18% 0% 35%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 33% 35% 14% 18% 0% 14%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 33% 35% 14% 18% 0% 18%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 33% 35% 14% 18% 0% 0%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Registry & Gift List
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices