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Roald Dahl's 11 best — and worst — children's books, ranked

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What would children’s literature be without the singular voice of Roald Dahl? Over the course of his long career, the British novelist wrote more than 30 works populated with clever children and frequently monstrous adults, sprinkled with made-up words, and shot through with sly, surprisingly dark humor. His stories were set in richly imagined worlds, taking place everywhere from the bowels of a mysterious chocolate factory to the heart of an impossibly huge peach — even outer space.

Troubling personal politics aside, Dahl is responsible for some of children’s literature’s most memorable characters, from sadistic candymaker Willy Wonka to telekinetic Matilda to the sly, resourceful Fantastic Mr. Fox — many of whom have now been immortalized onscreen as well as on the page.

And today is Dahl's hundredth birthday. In honor of the occasion, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to create a definitive ranking of Dahl’s children’s books. Read on to find out where each one ended up.

Please note that we only considered full-length works, not short stories, and that these rankings are immutable and 100 percent accurate.

11) George’s Marvelous Medicine (1981)

George's Marvelous Medicine

George’s grandmother has a puckered mouth and teeth stained pale brown. She forces her 8-year-old grandson to make her endless cups of tea and eat cabbage riddled with bugs. She’s a thoroughly unpleasant woman. So George decides to shake her up; he makes her a dose of medicine.

Gleefully he mixes together curry powder and shampoo and antifreeze and other substances he finds lying around the house — but when he feeds it to his grandmother, it doesn’t have quite the effect he had in mind. It makes her grow, becoming unimaginably large. Which, George’s father proclaims, means George has effectively solved world hunger!

Wait — huh ?

Yeah, that solving-world-hunger angle comes out of nowhere at the end, as does the rest of the story’s not-exactly-resolution. Add to that the sheer bitterness of the premise, and you have one of Dahl’s most uneven works. — Constance Grady

10) Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972)

Speaking of bitterness, there was no shortage of it on display in the sequel to Dahl’s most famous and most-beloved book. Moving the action as far away from Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory as possible, Dahl puts his heroes, Charlie Bucket and Willy Wonka, in a great glass elevator for what amounts to an epic road (space) trip with Charlie’s whole family, complete with all the long-suffering "are we there yet?" moments such a description implies.

But Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator also contains scathing, largely clichéd diatribes against US politics, including a weirdly infantilized look at the US president. Charlie’s two loving grandmothers from the previous book are abruptly transformed at the beginning of this one into unbearable, demonized examples of every shallow human trait Dahl can think to burden them with. By the time the Vermicious Knids come along, you’re rooting for the aliens to win and wishing Charlie were still mooning by the chocolate river. What was Dahl thinking? — Aja Romano

9) Revolting Rhymes (1982)

Revolting Rhymes .

A collection of rhyming poems, Revolting Rhymes isn’t a "typical" Dahl book. But the author’s singsong retellings of six famous fairy tales — with all the grotesque details Disney left out — provide an apt showcase for his twisted sense of humor. This makes sense, since Dahl’s stories already borrow so much from fairy-tale tropes; almost all of his children’s stories involve neglected kids, villainous hags, and/or impossibly magical creatures.

Still: Dahl takes fairy tales to another level in Revolting Rhymes , creating a bloodbath out of Cinderella’s romance, making Little Red Riding Hood a stone-cold killer, and saddling Snow White with seven gambling-addict dwarfs. As with all of Dahl’s best works, Revolting Rhymes is incredibly strange and even disturbing, but often a whole lot of fun. —Caroline Framke

8) The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (1977)

The Henry Sugar anthology is an odd one to consume in the middle of a Roald Dahl binge, but it’s always been one of my favorites. It is, in a word, variable: There are minor short stories, like the forgettable one with the giant tortoise (no, not Esio Trot , the other one), and autobiographical accounts of Dahl’s life, including how his time as a fighter pilot in World War II led him to start writing.

But the crown jewel of the book is the title story: the tale of Henry Sugar, a selfish gambler who teaches himself to see through solid objects in order to cheat at cards and eventually reforms himself into a secular saint. It has all the sweetness and heart of the best of Dahl’s full-length novels, but it’s tinged with unmistakable melancholy. — Constance Grady

7) Fantastic Mr. Fox (1968)

Dahl took a short break from sympathizing with humans in Fantastic Mr. Fox, the only book on this list told from the perspective of a (particularly clever) group of animals. But the titular Mr. Fox is exactly the kind of hero Dahl loves; namely, he’s always the smartest person fox in the room. It’s a thin volume, but the conflict between the Fox family and three greedy farmers is rich in detail, layered with tidbits covering everything from Farmer Bean’s addiction to alcoholic cider to the elaborate dinner party courses Mrs. Fox prepares with the spoils that her fantastic husband triumphantly steals from beneath the dumb farmers’ noses. —Caroline Framke

6) The Witches (1983)

The Witches .

The Witches is a pitch-black horror story about a boy who finds himself smack dab in the middle of an international conference of evil women. Luckily, he has a shrewd and savvy grandmother who has made him as witch-proof as any boy can be.

With their elegant white gloves and their long, pointed heels masking hideous bodies, Dahl’s witches lurk in ordinary society, waiting to prey on innocent children. The Witches doesn’t flirt with outright misogyny so much as skywrite "women aren’t what they seem!" But Dahl’s witches are compelling, fascinating, and powerful — and ultimately it’s their power that turns a straightforward cautionary tale thoroughly on its head, resulting in one of his most memorable books. This fable of mice and (wo)men manages to be warm, whimsical, and spine-tingling all at once; I reread it every Halloween and find myself deliciously creeped out every time. — Aja Romano

5) Danny, Champion of the World (1975)

Dahl is fantastic at describing whimsical settings, but most of them aren’t places you’d actually want to live in: Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory would doubtless maim you, in Mr. Fox’s den you’d be attacked by murderous farmers, and the BFG’s native land is home to scores of bigger, less friendly giants.

No, if you made me choose a Dahl book to live in, it would be Danny . I want to hang out in that cozy caravan Danny shares with his father as it’s gently pelted by an apple tree, and eat roast pheasant (the food of kings, according to Danny’s father). I want to learn top-secret poaching tips and plump raisins in water to make pheasant bait. Dahl never wrote another world that made you want to crawl inside the pages and curl up there quite as much. — Constance Grady

4) James and the Giant Peach (1961)

For a book that opens on a little boy struggling under the tyrannical rule of his abusive aunts — a straight-up Dickensian dilemma — James and the Giant Peach tells an incredibly lovely story. It has an overlying sense of wonder, as conveyed through the mysterious creatures that first grow the titular peach to mammoth size, the jolly centipede causing constant mischief with his 100 (or maybe just 42) shoes, and the short-fused giants that James and his magical new insect friends meet when their swollen stone fruit floats up into the sky. But the engine that keeps this book moving — and the reason it continues to resonate so deeply — isn’t the giant peach but James’s giant heart. —Caroline Framke

3) Matilda (1988)

If you were a fan of Dahl as a youngster, chances are you were a bookish kid with an active imagination. And what more glorious fantasy existed for all of us bookish, imaginative kids than the idea that our minds could make miraculous things happen, even in the world beyond our heads?

Matilda’s telekinesis might seem of a piece with today’s never-ending stream of superhero movies, but Dahl’s 1988 novel extols the virtues of brain power over superpowers. Matilda is a thrilling story of intelligence and ingenuity triumphing over TV-dulled ignorance, a love song to classic novels, and an utterly satisfying tale of a child serving a bit of justice to grown-ups for the indignities both small and large that are part and parcel of being a kid. Plus, despite the unfortunate fate of poor Bruce Bogtrotter, it always leaves me with a craving for chocolate cake. —Tanya Pai

2) The BFG (1982)

Dahl’s prose has a rhythm all its own, with peculiar turns of phrase and a penchant for streaking off into rhyming verse bumping up against each other to create something wholly unique. And The BFG ‘s story of a little orphan girl and the big friendly giant she befriends may be Dahl’s finest example of his gift for wordplay. The pages are packed with nonsense terms that nevertheless evoke exactly what they intend to (you know just what you’re getting with snozzcumbers); and the passage where the BFG explains to Sophie what humans from each country taste like is a wit-filled delight.

And while there are some truly horrific aspects to the story — orphans getting locked in the cellar with rats; giants who crunch up humans like popcorn — there’s plenty of wonder as well. The idea that the stars have a silvery music all their own, and that our dreams come not from the workings of our unconscious minds but via the whims of a gentle giant from a faraway land, is as captivating and wrenchingly beautiful as an adult as it was in childhood. —Tanya Pai

1) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)

There’s so much wonderful weirdness lurking in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , a heartwarming story of a poor boy whose goodness earns him the coveted golden ticket that allows him to meet Willy Wonka, the plum-and-green-clad chocolatier. His journey to Wonka’s factory is nothing short of a dream. There’s so much to see: Everlasting Gobstoppers! Snozzberries! Chocolate mixing via waterfall! And you get to eat nothing but sweets all day long! Sure, the entire factory definitely needs a visit from D EFRA , but what mysterious chocolate factory run by a sociopathic maniacal supergenius doesn’t ?

Charlie ultimately wins a fantasy apprenticeship with the world’s greatest candymaker, while the other children on his factory tour, all greedy and spoiled, learn unpleasant karmic lessons about the dangers of selfishness. It’s a lovely, chocolate-powered morality play — until you realize Wonka is housing a slave nation of Ewoks turned sweatshop workers.

Then there’s the decimating poverty and literal starvation that Charlie and his family endure, the four grandparents who’ve all shared the same bed without leaving it for 20 years, and the truly creeptastic ends that each of Charlie’s competitors meet at the hands of the unperturbed Wonka. Oh, and have I mentioned all the pederastic vibes and the overt BDSM overtones? (Remember the actual whips used for whipping cream?)

Despite — and because of — all this bizarreness, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remains one of the most influential children’s books ever written. Without Charlie , we’d have no Harry Potter , no Coraline . Its caricatures of spoiled kids and narcissistic parents are unerring and timeless; its satirical takes on human nature are pointed and merciless. Veruca Salt, Augustus Gloop, Mike Teavee, and Violet Beauregarde may be revolting children, but there’s a part of all of us that would be right there beside them, reaching for that extra-special chewing gum. — Aja Romano

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15 Best Roald Dahl Books for Kids and Adults Alike

Explore imaginary worlds and expand horizons with the best books from this well-renowned author.

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The beloved author is back in the headlines recently for controversial reasons, though. Some of his books, including iconic titles like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “James and the Giant Peach,” are being rewritten by Puffin Books.

This action has been met with much criticism from other beloved children’s book authors including Judy Blume . “I think if Roald Dahl was around, you would be hearing what he thinks about that. Whatever he is, whatever he’s accused of being, there’s a lot of truth there,” she said . “But the books are the books. Kids still love the books, and they love them the way he wrote them. So I don’t believe in that.”

Regardless of your take on the current controversy, one thing is for sure: Roald Dahl wrote classics that have shaped the childhoods of countless readers. We rounded up the best of the best Roald Dahl books you should absolutely have on your bookshelf.

Puffin Books Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Probably the most famous of the Roald Dahl books, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is a story that spans multiple generations.

Originally written back in 1964, the story of the honest Charlie Bucket and the four other mischievous children who get to visit Willy Wonka’s factory still resonates with audiences today — because of the timeless tome, yes, but also due to its several film adaptations, including the most recent one starring Johnny Depp.

More: Roald Dahl Wrote 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' During the 'Most Difficult Years of His Life'

Puffin Books Matilda

Is there anything more magical than the classic tale of “Matilda?” An Amazon Teacher’s Pick, this story describes the life of a sweet, exceptional young girl with parents who don’t understand her. It’s available in many formats, including an audiobook read by Kate Winslet. It’s the perfect complement to the new musical that’s currently streaming on Netflix.

imusti The Witches

The first time you met the witches serves as a core memory for many millennials. This classic novel by Roald Dahl speaks to children (and children-at-heart) from any generation. Not your average fairy tale, this one is a bit scary and focuses on the story of The Grand High Witch, her coven, and what they do to children who don’t behave.

Puffin Books James and the Giant Peach

Poor James — his parents are tragically eaten by a rhinoceros and he’s forced to move in with his two horrible aunts, Spiker and Sponge. It’s no fun at all there, until one day, when he drops some magic crystals by the old peach tree. Strange things happen and life starts to take an exciting turn for young James. This “peachy” scented edition makes the adventure even more fun.

Puffin Books The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Another classic Roald Dahl book, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” (now also a charming Wes Anderson claymation film by the same name) tells the story of Mr. Fox himself. The sly main character has been stealing from the three meanest farmers around. They’re on a mission to catch him, but Mr. Fox is determined to win at any cost. He has a fantastic plan to get away with it, too.

Puffin Books The Twits

The Twits is Roald Dahl’s story about a gross couple. No, literally: They’re smelly, nasty, and downright mean. They love to play jokes on each other and also treat their caged monkeys, the Muggle-Womps, poorly. But the Muggle-Womps have had enough and are ready to strike back against the Twits.

imusti Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

If you loved “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” you’ll love this follow-up Roald Dahl book.

“Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator” picks up where the first book left off. It details the story of Charlie’s adventure with his family and Willy Wonka, who are all traveling inside the Great Glass Elevator, a thousand feet above the chocolate factory. They can see the whole world below them — but they're not alone.

Everyman's Library The BFG

Another beloved classic book from Roald Dahl, “The BFG” is also a fan-favorite film . It’s the heart-warming tale of Sophie who is snatched from her orphanage bed by the BFG, short for Big Friendly Giant. Sophie is initially afraid that the BFG will eat her, but she ends up joining forces to battle some less gentle giants who threaten the children of Earth.

Puffin Books Danny the Champion of the World

Another unique child experience masterfully described by Roald Dahl, Danny is one of a kind. He lives in a van, is the youngest master car mechanic around, and his best friend is his dad. One night though, Danny discovers a shocking secret that his father never told him and everything seems to change.

Viking Books for Young Readers The Magic Finger

“The Magic Finger” depicts the story of the Gregg family who loves to hunt. Their next-door neighbor, a special little girl, does not like it at all. When she gets angry, she can’t help herself when she turns her magic finger on the Gregg family. Before they know it, they’re transformed in a big way.

Viking Books for Young Readers Going Solo

This Roald Dahl book is actually an autobiographical account of the life of the writer himself before he became the author that we know and love today.

It details his exploits as a World War II pilot, including the daring deeds and fantastic adventures you might not know about this beloved author.

Puffin Books Skin and Other Stories

One of Roald Dahl’s lesser-known books, “Skin and Other Stories” is still one worth having on your bookshelf. It’s a collection of eleven short stories that ask provocative questions. How would you get rid of a murder weapon? Where would you hide a diamond? Roald Dahl gives his spin on these mysterious topics (and more!) in this interesting book.

Puffin Books George's Marvelous Medicine

Another classic often shared in elementary schools, teachers and children alike love “George’s Marvelous Medicine.”

George is with his grandma — who is a horribly grouchy grandma. He takes it upon himself to make a special medicine for her to cure her of this grouchiness. Similar to most Roald Dahl books, hilarity ensues, and the outcome isn’t exactly what George initially expected.

Puffin Books The Enormous Crocodile

Another great use of character development by Road Dahl, this book tells the story of The Enormous Crocodile. He is incredibly hungry and equally greedy. Of course, he loves to eat children, too. He thinks he can’t be stopped, but other animals in the jungle have something to say about that. Soon the Enormous Crocodile learns a lesson he won’t forget.

Penguin Group Roald Dahl 15-Book Box Set

Want to grab all of the essential Roald Dahl books at once? Look no further. This great set of Roald Dahl classics includes many on our list, like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “The Twits,” and more of the best Roald Dahl books that deserve a spot on your shelf.

Katie McBroom is an award-winning content creator and freelance writer. Prior to contributing to Biography, she served as Content Editor for Google and Beauty Editor for Best Products. Her work has also appeared in publications including CNN, WWD, Business Insider, Forbes, and Men's Health, among others.

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Biography of Roald Dahl, British Novelist

The Memorable Author of Iconic Children's Novels

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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.
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By Claire Messud

• Sept. 30, 2010

At 6 feet 5 inches tall, Roald Dahl was larger than life. His imposing and complicated personality makes all the more sense when you picture him as a near giant: Donald Sturrock notes that at their first meeting, “his body seemed larger than the doorway and far, far too big for the proportions of the cottage.” How to capture him in words? Dahl told Sturrock, “while munching on a lobster claw,” that “biographies were boring,” and Sturrock has set out to prove him wrong. He is significantly aided in this by the flamboyance of the subject himself.

Almost all of us — anyone who has been, in the last 50 years, either a parent or a child — has at some point loved Roald Dahl, or perhaps hated him. His books, and now the films of his books, have punctuated Anglophone childhood, and their characters, vocabularies and ditties have slipped into our common parlance. Charlie’s chocolate-factory encounters with Oompa-Loompas, Augustus Gloop and snozzberries; the horrid aunts Spiker and Sponge in “James and the Giant Peach”; the villains of “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “Boggis and Bunce and Bean / One fat, one short, one lean. / Those horrible crooks / So different in looks / Were nonetheless equally mean” — Dahl’s invented worlds have achieved that rare literary transcendence: they live, in all their deliciousness, in our collective imaginations.

It seems inevitable, then, that we should want to know his biography. But the children who adore his stories are wisely indifferent to the details of the author’s life; and the adults who delve into them risk finding their affection for the author somewhat tarnished. Sturrock’s new biography, which comes 20 years after Dahl’s death and follows but does not supplant Jeremy Treglown’s acclaimed and insightful 1994 account, exists as the “authorized” version. Dahl’s widow was unhappy with Treglown’s book — so much so that she sought to retrieve rights to Dahl’s books from his American publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux — and the family commissioned Sturrock, a former BBC producer and friend of Dahl’s, to write an alternative version. Granted wide access to Dahl’s papers and letters, Sturrock, a novice biographer, has produced a thorough, if not especially literary, book. He writes that he has tried, “everywhere possible, to keep Dahl’s own voice to the fore, and to allow the reader to encounter him as I did, ‘warts and all.’ ”

His is an unenviable task (pleasing family members and providing a truthful account are not obviously compatible aims), and there are places where his portrayal verges uncomfortably on the reverent. This is particularly true in Sturrock’s somewhat breathless assessments of the work. In ­describing Dahl’s first, deservedly unread novel, he calls it “extraordinary, undervalued and visionary.” And while Sturrock is frank about Dahl’s zealous youthful womanizing, about his gambling and drinking and the notorious fits of ill temper that soured many friendships and professional connections, he treads gingerly around the question of Dahl’s ­anti-Semitism, for example, and around what were obviously thorny family relations. Both Dahl’s first wife, the late Patricia Neal, and their oldest surviving daughter, Tessa, have written unflatteringly about him, but Sturrock’s book implies that time has healed all wounds. Tensions in Dahl’s relations with his son, Theo, are handled with considerable, even moving, delicacy.

If Sturrock does not dwell on these interior darknesses, it may be in part because the life affords so much external drama. Interestingly, Dahl does not emerge as a particularly reflective individual: his ­puerile humor, his lively imagination, his rebellious zeal and his determination were all strongly at odds with any analytical bent. It’s no surprise that “Get on with it” was one of his favorite phrases.

Born in Wales in 1916 to prosperous Norwegian parents, Dahl lost his elder sister, Astri, to peritonitis in 1920, when she was 7 and he was 3. (In a hideous echo of this anguish, he would lose his own beloved firstborn daughter, Olivia, to measles in 1962, when she too was 7.) His father, grief-stricken, succumbed to pneumonia shortly thereafter, leaving Roald’s “dauntless” mother to raise four children and two stepchildren alone.

Dahl, just 9 when he was sent to boarding school, was rebellious from an early age. He disdained university and went instead to work for the Asiatic Petroleum Company, later part of Royal Dutch Shell. In 1938, he was posted to Tanganyika (now Tanzania), where “much of his spare time was spent playing squash, darts and golf at the whites-only Dar es Salaam Club or socializing at the colonial cocktail parties.” When war broke out, he decided to join the Royal Air Force. It was, Sturrock says, “a fateful decision, perhaps the most important he ever made.”

There is no question that Dahl’s brief but difficult war changed him forever. He crashed his plane in North Africa before ever reaching combat and was so severely injured that he suffered for the rest of his life. Dahl “suspected that the brain injuries which he received . . . had materially altered his personality and inclined him to creative writing”; but whatever the reason, he began thereafter to write, initially about his experiences as a fighter pilot.

He was also liberal with the truth. He told the story of his plane crash as though he had been shot down, which was not true. He told it as though he had been alone, when in fact a fellow pilot had been flying as well, landed his own plane safely and probably saved Dahl’s life. He was, from the first, a writer of fiction.

But he would not gain fame as a children’s writer until he was in his mid-40s. While working in Washington for the British government (eventually as a spy), he began writing fiction; and it was as an author of short stories for adults that he would first be known in the United States. He was, for many years, more successful here than in his native Britain. As Sturrock observes, with an unfortunately frequent Nancy Drew-like clunkiness, “The Americans took the handsome, uniformed, opinionated outsider to their hearts.”

Contradictory and contrary, Dahl loved glamour and isolation alike: he married Neal, a rising young actress, in 1953, soon after her breakup with Gary Cooper, then whisked her off to live in rural England. Theirs was not a particularly happy union. As Sturrock puts it, again clunkily, “If his writing career was blooming, Roald’s short but already storm-tossed marriage seemed to be heading straight for the rocks.” Nevertheless, together they had five children: Olivia, Tessa, Theo, Ophelia and Lucy. They also faced an inordinate share of adversity. In addition to the loss of Olivia, Theo was seriously injured as an infant in a car accident in New York and spent years in recovery, and Neal had a severe stroke at the age of 39, when she was pregnant with Lucy.

Dahl’s brutal iron discipline brought Neal back from near death to the summum of her acting career. What they achieved is the stuff of legend, but it also took an untenable toll on their marriage. When, in 1972, Felicity Crosland (known as Liccy) appeared at their house to work on a television commercial with Neal, Dahl “experienced a violent and dramatic coup de foudre ,” Sturrock tells us. Thus began a 10-year affair that culminated in Dahl’s divorce and happy remarriage.

Roald Dahl’s life was extraordinary in the share of pain, both physical and emotional, he was forced to endure, and in his steely determination to triumph in spite of his tragedies. Sturrock’s account, while not elegant, is authoritative, and offers us a careful, loving outline of a difficult man. Dahl’s literary self, however — what he actually thought, and how he created, and how he captures, so fully and slyly, the minds of children and adults alike — ­remains a secret.

This, as any child knows, is surely for the best.

STORYTELLER

The authorized biography of roald dahl.

By Donald Sturrock

Illustrated. 655 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30

Claire Messud is the author, most recently, of “The Emperor’s Children.”

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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

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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'

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Roald Dahl Biography

Roald Dahl was born on September 13, 1916 in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales, to Norwegian immigrants Harald and Sofie Dahl. He grew up speaking Norwegian at home with his parents and sisters. When Dahl was three years old, he lost his older sister Astri to appendicitis, and then weeks later his father died of pneumonia. Despite these tragedies, Dahl was an imaginative and rambunctious child. When Dahl was eight, his primary school headmaster beat him for playing a practical joke on the owner of a local sweet shop, which led Dahl’s mother to transfer him to a British boarding school. After that, Dahl attended the prestigious Repton School. Dahl chafed under Repton’s strict rules, and despised the student hazing culture. However, Cadbury, a British chocolate company, often sent boxes of new chocolate bars to Repton for the students to sample and review. The chocolate sampling would later inspire one of Dahl’s most famous novels, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964). Although Dahl’s mother was willing to pay for his university education, Dahl craved adventure. After graduating from Repton in 1934, he went on a sea expedition in Newfoundland and then took a job with Shell Oil in Tanzania.

At the outbreak of World War II, Dahl joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) and flew in campaigns throughout the Middle East and northern Africa. In 1940, Dahl’s plane crashed over Libya, and he sustained severe head, neck, and back injuries that kept him out of battle for months. After recovering from his injuries, Dahl took part in the Battle of Athens. After that, he became assistant air attaché at the British embassy in Washington, D.C. He supplied intelligence back to Britain, with the goal of helping the British government encourage the United States to join the war. Here Dahl met British novelist C. S. Forester, who encouraged Dahl to write stories about his time in the air force. The American magazine The Saturday Evening Post published one of Dahl’s accounts in 1942 under the title “Shot Down Over Libya.” In 1953, Dahl married American actress Patricia Neal, with whom he had five children: Olivia, Sophie, Theo, Ophelia, and Lucy. They divorced thirty years later, and Dahl married a British film producer named Felicity Crosland seven years before his death.

In 1943, Dahl wrote his first children’s book, The Gremlins . Dahl then turned his focus to writing short stories for adults, primarily mysteries and thrillers. After becoming a father, Dahl began telling stories to his children, which led to his return to writing children’s fiction. His first successful children’s novel was James and the Giant Peach (1961), which introduces Dahl’s hallmark dark humor and gore along with a sense of adventure and imagination. In 1970, he wrote Fantastic Mr. Fox , whose greedy farmer villains typify Dahl’s antagonists: miserly and violent. In the 1980s, Dahl wrote some of his best-loved novels, including The BFG (1982), The Witches (1983), and Matilda (1988). Like many Dahl classics, these novels feature kind and bright children who must defeat tyrannical adult figures. In the 1980s, Dahl also wrote two memoirs, Boy (1984), which told of his childhood, and Going Solo (1986), which described his time in the RAF.

In addition to his novels, Dahl wrote extensively for film and television. Like Dahl’s novels and short stories, his screenplays run the gamut of adult thrillers and children’s fantasy. In 1961, Dahl wrote for and presented the 1961 science fiction anthology television series “Way Out” for the BBC. He collaborated on the script for the James Bond movie “You Only Live Twice” (1967) and the musical family film “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (1968). He also contributed to the screenplay for the 1971 film adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (called “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory”). In 1979, the BBC adapted Dahl’s short story collection, Tales of the Unexpected, into an anthology television show that coincided with the book’s release.

In 1983, Dahl received the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, recognizing his great contribution to fantasy literature. He died of an infection in 1990 at the age of 74. His final children’s book, The Minpins , was published posthumously in 1991.

Roald Dahl Study Guides

Charlie and the chocolate factory, roald dahl quotes.

“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”

“All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen. If only they would read a little Dickens or Kipling they would soon discover there was more to life than cheating people and watching television.”

“I don't want a grown-up person at all. A grownup won't listen to me; he won't learn. He will try to do things his own way and not mine. So I have to have a child. I want a good sensible loving child, one to whom I can tell all my most precious candy-making secrets-while I am still alive.”

Roald Dahl Novels

The gremlins, some time never: a fable for supermen, james and the giant peach, the magic finger, fantastic mr. fox, charlie and the great glass elevator, danny, the champion of the world, the enormous crocodile, my uncle oswald, george's marvellous medicine, the witches, the giraffe and the pelly and me, the minpins (posthumous), roald dahl short stories, over to you: ten stories of flyers and flying, someone like you, twenty-nine kisses from roald dahl, switch bitch, the wonderful story of henry sugar and six more, tales of the unexpected, more tales of the unexpected, ah, sweet mystery of life: the country stories of roald dahl, roald dahl nonfiction, boy: tales of childhood, measles, a dangerous illness, roald dahl plays, roald dahl poetry, revolting rhymes, dirty beasts, take a study break.

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Dahl, Roald

BORN: 1916, Llandaff, South Wales

DIED: 1990, Oxford, England

NATIONALITY: English

GENRE: Novels, short stories

MAJOR WORKS: Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying (1946) James and the Giant Peach (1961) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) The BFG (1982) Matilda (1988)

A writer of both children's fiction and short stories for adults, Roald Dahl (1916–1990) is best known as the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . Dahl's works for children have been praised as skillfully crafted, with fast-paced plots, captivating detail, and onomatopoetic words that lend themselves to being read aloud. His adult-oriented short stories are noted for their dark humor, surprise endings, and subtle horror. Whether writing for juveniles or an adult audience, Dahl has been described as a master of story construction with a remarkable ability to weave a tale.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

Boarding School: Source of Darkness Dahl was born in Llandaff, South Wales, to Norwegian parents and spent his childhood summers visiting his grandparents in Oslo, Norway. After his father died when Dahl was four, his mother honored her late husband's wish that Dahl be sent to English schools. Dahl subsequently attended Llandaff Cathedral School, where he began a series of academic misadventures. After he and several other students were severely beaten by the headmaster for placing a dead mouse in a cruel storekeeper's candy jar, Dahl's mother moved him to St. Peter's Boarding School and later to Repton, a renowned private school.

Later, Dahl recalled in his short autobiographical story “Lucky Break” that the “beatings at Repton were more fierce and more frequent than anything I had yet experienced.” Standing six feet, six inches tall, Dahl played soccer and served as the captain of the squash and handball teams but did not excel in academics. One teacher commented on the fourteen-year-old boy's English composition work: “I have never met a boy who so persistently writes the exact opposite of what he means. He seems incapable of marshaling his thoughts on paper.” One year later, another comment on an English composition of Dahl's read: “A persistent muddler. Vocabulary negligible, sentences mal-constructed. He reminds me of a camel.” Dahl would later describe his school years as “days of horrors” that inspired much of his macabre fiction.

Plane Crash: An Unusual Beginning Dahl was flying over the African desert for the Royal Air Force during World War II when he was forced to make an emergency landing. He was rescued by another pilot and transported to a hospital in Alexandria, Egypt. His skull was fractured and plastic surgery was necessary to repair the damage to his nose. Six months later, he had recuperated to the point that he could fly a Hurricane fighter with his squadron in Greece against the Germans. Dahl shot down four enemy planes, and his own plane was one of the four out of the thirty Hurricanes in that campaign to survive. Then, as Dahl's old injuries began to cause dangerous blackouts when he flew, he returned to England. At a club one night, he met the undersecretary of state for Air, Harold Balfour, and Balfour gave Dahl his next post as an assistant air attaché in Washington, D.C.

While it took Dahl six months to recover—and he would live with the recurrent pain of his injuries for the rest of his life—Dahl's crash landing set him on a course

that led him to his career as a writer. Wanting to write about Dahl's most exciting war experience for a Saturday Evening Post article, reporter C. S. Forester interviewed Dahl over lunch one day in Washington. Because Forester could not eat and take notes at the same time, Dahl offered to write some notes later for the journalist. Those notes became the story “A Piece of Cake,” the first of Dahl's work to bring him money and recognition. Dahl went on to write a number of stories for adults about being a fighter pilot.

In Dahl's first book for children, he did not stray far from the fighter-pilot stories he had created for adults. The Gremlins tells the story of evil little men who caused war planes to crash. After these beings are discovered, they are convinced to work for the pilots instead of against them. The Gremlins was a popular success. After First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt read the book to her children, she invited Dahl to dinner at the White House . Walt Disney was so taken with the story that he planned to transform it into a motion picture. In the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review , May Lamberton Becker advised her readers to preserve The Gremlins “as a firsthand source book on the origin of a genuine addition to folklore. That is, preserve it if the children in the family don't read it to bits ….”

Father and Storyteller The births of Dahl's children provided him an opportunity to tell the children bedtime stories, a practice that allowed the author to develop his understanding of the kind of stories children enjoyed. In an article for The Writer , Dahl observed that children love suspense, action, magic, “new inventions,” “secret information,” and “seeing the villain meet a grisly death.” According to Dahl, children “hate descriptive passages and flowery prose,” and “can spot a clumsy sentence.” As Dahl's children grew older, he wrote both Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , the story of a poor boy who is selected to be the new owner of a world-famous chocolate factory, and James and the Giant Peach , which recounts the fantastic tale of a young boy who travels thousands of miles in a house-sized peach with as bizarre an assemblage of companions as can be found in a children's book.

Works in Literary Context

Revenge and Violence One way that Dahl delights his readers is by exacting often vicious revenge on cruel adults who harm children. In Matilda , the Amazonian headmistress Miss Trunchbull, who deals with unruly children by grabbing them by the hair and tossing them out windows, is finally banished by the brilliant Matilda. The Witches , released as a movie in 1990, finds the heroic young character, who has been turned into a mouse, thwarting the hideous and diabolical witches' plans to kill all the children of England. But even innocent adults receive rough treatment. In James and the Giant Peach , parents are eaten by a rhinoceros, and aunts are flattened by the eponymous giant peach. In The Witches , parents are killed in car crashes, and pleasant fathers are murdered in Matilda .

However, Dahl explained in the New York Times Book Review that the children who wrote to him “invariably pick out the most gruesome events as the favorite parts of the books…. They don't relate it to life. They enjoy the fantasy. And my nastiness is never gratuitous. It's retribution. Beastly people must be punished.”

Dahl's Writings for Adults Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying is a collection of Dahl's early stories. One tale especially, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” is a much more polished story than one would expect from a relatively inexperienced writer. A notable aspect of this piece, also seen in several of the other stories in the book, is the clear influence of Ernest Hemingway on the young writer's style.

Critics have compared much of Dahl's adult-oriented fiction to the works of Guy de Maupassant , O. Henry, and Saki. Praised by commentators as well crafted and suspenseful, Dahl's stories employ surprise endings and shrewd characters who are rarely what they seem to be. Dahl also experimented with comic themes in his novel My Uncle Oswald . The title character, Oswald Hendryks Cornelius, is a charming man of the world who embarks upon a business venture to collect and preserve semen samples from geniuses and royalty, hoping wealthy women who desire superior offspring will want to be his clients. Like Dahl's short stories, My Uncle Oswald features duplicitous characters, and some critics have

observed that it shares a common theme with much of his short fiction: a depiction of the superficial nature of modern civilization.

Works in Critical Context

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is Dahl's most popular and most controversial children's story. Many critics have censured this work for its alleged stereotyping and inhumanity, and have accused Dahl of racism for his portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas. In the original version of the story, the Oompa-Loompas are described as black pygmies from deepest Africa who sing and dance and work for nearly nothing. In a revised edition, Dahl changed their appearance and gave them a mythical homeland. Still, claims of prejudice persist. In Now Upon a Time: A Contemporary View of Children's Literature , Myra Pollack Sadker and David Miller Sadker criticized Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for its “ageism”: “The message with which we close the book is that the needs and desires and opinions of old people are totally irrelevant and inconsequential.”

The publication and popularity of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory evoked criticism from experts in children's literature who thought that the violence, insensitivity, or supposed racism in the text was offensive or inappropriate for children. Many critics have objected to the rough treatment of adults. Eleanor Cameron, for example, in Children's Literature in Education , found that “Dahl caters to the streak of sadism in children which they don't even realize is there because they are not fully self-aware and are not experienced enough to understand what sadism is.” “It is difficult to avoid the feeling that Dahl … enjoys writing about violence, while at the same time condemning it,” remarked David Rees in Children's Literature in Education , adding: “Dahl … parades his own irritations—television addiction … overindulgence in sweets, gum-chewing, shooting foxes, beards, ugly faces, fat bodies, cranky old people, spoiled children—and presents them as moral objections.” Dahl's supporters have argued that in Charlie , as in his other children's books, Dahl follows the traditional fairy tale style, which includes extreme exaggeration and the swift and horrible destruction of evildoers; they contend that children are not harmed by this approach. Critic Alas-dair Campbell, writing in School Librarian , argued that “normal children are bound to take some interest in the darker side of human nature, and books for them should be judged not by picking out separate elements but rather on the basis of their overall balance and effect.”

If critics disagreed about the suitability of some of Dahl's books for children, most agreed that Dahl was a talented writer. According to Michael Wood of New Society , “Dahl is at his best when he reveals the horrible thinness of much of our respectability; at his worst and most tiresome when he nudges us towards the contemplation of mere naughtiness … what is striking about Dahl's work, both for children and adults, is its carefully pitched appeal to its different audiences …. He has tact, timing, a clean, economic style, an abundance of ingenuity … above all he knows how to manipulate his readers.”

Responses to Literature

• Read one of Dahl's children's books and read one of his short stories written for an adult audience. What are some of the key differences between the “voices” of these texts? (Consider the words Dahl uses, the themes the works focus on, and the action within the texts.)
• Read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . Consider why Willy Wonka decides to give the chocolate factory to Charlie? If you were Willy Wonka, would you have chosen Charlie? What would have happened to the factory if Willy Wonka had chosen another child?

LITERARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEMPORARIES

Dahl's famous contemporaries include:

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962): First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt was a key figure in Franklin Delano Roosevelt 's New Deal policy, which helped the United States survive the Great Depression . C. S. Lewis (1898–1963): Lewis is best known for The Chronicles of Narnia (1965), which present the adventures of children who play central roles in the unfolding history of the fictional realm of Narnia, a place where animals talk, magic is common, and good battles evil. Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961): Just as Dahl's earliest work was inspired by his experience in World War II , this American novelist's writing is largely inspired by his service in World War I . Pablo Picasso (1881–1973): This Spanish artist worked in a variety of media, including paint and ceramics, and he is often associated with the cubist art movement.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carpenter, Humphrey, and Mari Prichard. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Georgiou, Constantine. Children and Their Literature . Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

McCann, Donnarae, and Gloria Woodard, eds. The Black American in Books for Children: Readings in Racism . Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1972.

Mote, Dave, ed. Contemporary Popular Writers . Detroit: St. James Press, 1997.

Parker, Peter, ed. A Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Silvey, Anita, ed. Children's Books and Their Creators . New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1995.

Warren, Alan. Roald Dahl . Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont, 1988.

West, Mark T., interview with Roald Dahl. Trust Your Children: Voices against Censorship in Children's Books . New York: Neal-Schuman, 1988, pp. 71–76.

Wintle, Justin, and Emma Fisher. The Pied Pipers: Interviews with the Influential Creators of Children's Literature . London: Paddington Press, 1975.

COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Roald Dahl suffered a terrifying crash while a member of the Royal Air Force during World War II. Much of his adult-oriented literature deals with war and its effects on human beings. Following is a list of other texts that focus on the mental and emotional toll of war:

“I Will Fight No More Forever” (1877), by Chief Joseph. This famous speech was given by Nez Percé chief Joseph upon his surrender to the U.S. Army. “Dulce Et Decorum Est” (1920), by Wilfred Owen . Owen, a soldier in World War I , wrote this poetic rebuttal to a line from Horace that claimed it is “sweet and appropriate” that a young man should die in war for his country. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), a film directed by William Wyler . This Academy Award–winning film tells the story of three servicemen and the complications and struggles they face upon returning home after World War II. In the Lake of the Woods (1994), by Tim O'Brien. In this novel, the protagonist, John Wade, is a Vietnam veteran who continues to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder , which causes him to experiences bouts of rage, perhaps resulting in the murder of his wife.

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DAHL, Roald

Nationality: British. Born: Llandaff, Glamorgan, Wales, 13 September 1916. Education: Repton School, Yorkshire. Military Service: Served in the Royal Air Force , 1939-45; served for Royal Air Force in Nairobi and Habbanyah, 1939-40; manned a fighter squadron in the Western Desert, 1940 (wounded); manned a fighter squadron in Greece and Syria, 1941; assistant air attaché, Washington, D.C., 1942-43; wing commander, 1943; with British Security Co-ordination, North America , 1943-45. Family: Married 1) the actress Patricia Neal in 1953 (divorced 1983), one son and four daughters (one deceased); 2) Felicity Ann Crosland in 1983. Career: Writer. Member of Public Schools Exploring Society expedition to Newfoundland, 1934; Eastern staff, Shell Company, London, 1933-37 and Shell Company of East Africa, Dar-es-Salaam, 1937-39. Awards: Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award, 1953, 1959, 1980; Federation of Children's Book Groups award, 1983; Whitbread award, 1983; World Fantasy Convention award, 1983; Federation of Children's Book Groups award, 1989. D.Litt.: University of Keele, Staffordshire, 1988. Died: 23 November 1990.

Publications

Collections.

The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl . 1992.

The Roald Dahl Treasury. 1997.

Short Stories

Over to You: 10 Stories of Flyers and Flying. 1946.

Someone Like You. 1953; revised edition, 1961.

Kiss, Kiss. 1960.

Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl. 1969.

Selected Stories. 1970.

Penguin Modern Stories 12, with others. 1972.

Switch Bitch. 1974.

The Best of Dahl. 1978.

Tales of the Unexpected. 1979.

More Tales of the Unexpected. 1980; as Further Tales of the Unexpected, 1981.

A Dahl Selection: Nine Short Stories, edited by Roy Blatchford. 1980.

Two Fables. 1986.

A Second Dahl Selection: Eight Short Stories, edited by HélèneFawcett. 1987.

Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life, illustrated by John Lawrence. 1990.

Lamb to the Slaughter and Other Stories . 1995.

The Umbrella Man and Other Stories (for teenagers). 1998.

Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen. 1948.

My Uncle Oswald. 1979.

Fiction (for children)

The Gremlins, illustrated by Walt Disney Studio. 1943.

James and the Giant Peach, illustrated by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. 1961.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, illustrated by JosephSchindelman. 1964.

The Magic Finger, illustrated by William Pène du Bois. 1966.

Fantastic Mr. Fox, illustrated by Donald Chaffin. 1970.

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, illustrated by JosephSchindelman. 1972.

Danny, The Champion of the World, illustrated by Jill Bennett. 1975.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. 1977; as The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar. 1977.

The Complete Adventures of Charlie and Mr. Willy Wonka (omnibus), illustrated by Faith Jaques. 1978.

The Enormous Crocodile, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1978.

The Twits, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1980.

George's Marvellous Medicine, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1981.

The BFG, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1982.

The Witches, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1983.

The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1985.

Matilda, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1988.

Esio Trot, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1990.

The Vicar of Nibbleswicke, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1991.

The Honeys (produced New York , 1955).

Screenplays:

You Only Live Twice, with Harry Jack Bloom, 1967; Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, with Ken Hughes, 1968; The Night-Digger, 1970; The Lightning Bug, 1971; Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, 1971.

Television Play:

Lamb to the Slaughter ( Alfred Hitchcock Presents series), 1955.

Poetry (for children)

Revolting Rhymes, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1982.

Dirty Beasts, illustrated by Rosemary Fawcett. 1983.

Rhyme Stew, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1989.

Boy: Tales of Childhood (autobiography; for children). 1984.

Going Solo (autobiography; for children). 1986.

My Year . 1993.

Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes (recipe book for children). 1994.

The Roald Dahl Diary 1997. 1996.

Editor, Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories. 1983.

Critical Studies:

Dahl by Chris Powling, 1983; Dahl by Alan Warren, 1988; Roald Dahl: From the Gremlins to the Chocolate Factory by Alan Warren, 1994; Roald Dahl: The Champion Storyteller by Andrea Shavick, 1997.

After being severely wounded in World War II , and then resuming his career as a fighter pilot, Roald Dahl was sent to Washington as an assistant air attaché in 1942. It was in Washington that he began writing the short stories for American magazines about his wartime experience that were later collected as Over to You . Although Dahl later wrote more for children, his adult short fiction is included in a whole series of collections— Someone Like You , Kiss Kiss , Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl , Switch Bitch , and Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life . Some of these stories were dramatized for television and published in the two anthologies Tales of the Unexpected and More Tales of the Unexpected . Dahl's current reputation is, however, still largely dependent on his writing for children, and in 1983 he was awarded the Whitbread prize for The Witches . Although the more urbane short fiction was plainly written for adults, its foreshortened psychological and emotional perspectives, as well as other techniques, often bear the hallmark of a writer whose imagination is attuned to that of children.

The short story suits Dahl's imaginative purposes for a variety of reasons. It allows forceful moral points to be made without lengthy psychological analysis or emotional profundity. It permits a reliance on conversational exchange that promotes vividness and allows swift and effective caricature to be substituted for depth of characterization. Above all, it allows Dahl's point to be made in a single episode, anecdote, or escapade, often with his characteristic type of ending. He has been described as "the absolute master of the twist in the tale." Sometimes vicious twists at the end of the stories teasingly challenge the reader's generic expectations, generated by the register and language of the foregoing narration. The need for psychological complexity is replaced by a punchy story line, incidentally making the texts ideal for dramatization.

The literary techniques nevertheless are effective for being relatively unsophisticated. First-person narration is purposefully used to achieve real immediacy. In "Bitch" Dahl even introduces a mirror-system of first-person narrators in Uncle Oswald's diaries and the nephew who introduces them. The absurdity of the plot keeps the reader at a distance, while the mode of narration engages the reader's sympathies. Much the same might be said of "Pig," where the pretended literary form adds a further mine of irony. Dahl purports to be writing a fairy tale:

Once upon a time, in the City of New York , a beautiful baby boy was born into this world, and the joyful parents named him Lexington.

The alliterative "b" sounds, banal adjectives, the child's name, the upper case for "City," and the opening four words all converge to announce a register of amused irony. Lexington is referred to throughout the story as "our hero," portrayed as being sweetly innocent, with blond hair and blue eyes, writing a vegetarian cookbook, and living in the country where he looks after his elderly Aunt Glosspan. When she dies he buries her in the garden and goes to New York, where he is conned by a lawyer and eventually killed in an abattoir. The humor is macabre. The vegetarian not only eats meat, but becomes meat, falling into the boiling water with the other pigs. Writing about how to cook, he becomes cooked. The narrative is straight-faced, with "our hero" used in the last sentence. The fairy story pretense and faintly adolescent humor are deployed in a piece of short fiction dependent on subtle and adult ironies.

The boyishness of Dahl's humor remains conspicuous, locked into the grim period when his imagination was formed, between his famous account of being caned at his prep school (by a future archbishop of Canterbury) and his life as a beer-swilling young officer. He is fascinated by scrapes and how to get out of them, uses obsolete upper middle-class schoolboy slang, with words like "tough" and nicknames like "Stinker," and often uses pastiche of the boys' adventure story as a literary form.

The humor is bizarre, mischievous, sometimes ghoulish. In "Lamb to the Slaughter" a woman kills her husband with a joint of lamb from the freezer. With a dead husband and a frozen leg of lamb as his stage properties, Dahl sends her shopping and unfreezes the meat. The police are called as the murder weapon is roasting, and are prevailed on to eat it. Mary Moloney feels genuine grief, but cannot help sharing the reader's wry giggle as the police, thinking that the murder weapon "is probably right under our very noses," set about consuming it. That sort of humor, based on escapades and japes, runs right through Dahl's work, especially what he wrote for children.

In "The Twits" Mrs. Twit cooks "spaghetti" for her husband. In fact it is a plate of worms. Dahl is playing on what, until the quite recent past, was the average British child's unfamiliarity with pasta, and the xenophobic distaste for it. Mr. Twit invents a disease in revenge. He goes to great pains to convince Mrs. Twit that she has contracted "the dreaded shrinks," and that she is on the point of shrinking into oblivion. Once again children are always being warned against illnesses of which their age-group has no direct experience. The childish impishness of the children's stories is actually often distilled from the adult humor of more ambitious short fiction, like the resonant, alliterated names (Mr. Botibol, Mr. Buggage, Tibbs the butler, and Mrs. Tottle the secretary), or the schoolboy larks of trapping pheasants with raisins (in "The Champion of the World" from Kiss Kiss , which was in fact later reworked into a children's story, Danny, The Champion of the World ).

"Vengeance Is Mine" hinges on a similar schoolboy sense of fantasy and justice. Two broke young men set up a business of wreaking revenge on gossip columnists on behalf of the rich people they have insulted in their columns. In less than a week they earn enough to retire. Only adults can know that adult values are so warped that rich people mostly like appearing in gossip columns, and that is Dahl's comment.

Not all the short fiction uses the same stereotype. "Katina" deals with the experiences of a soldier, implicitly Dahl himself, and the horrors that he witnessed in Greece. Simply and unsentimentally, the narrator remembers, but the small orphaned girl of the title is used to imply a sharp accusation against the soldiers who remain unable to consider the actual consequences of their killings. At the end, when Katina is killed, the narrator stands unthinking for several hours. The implication is that at this moment he turned against war. Dahl touches on emotional profundity, but without psychological complexity.

Dahl wrote unpretentiously, and laid no claim to the moral high ground. He wanted to entertain, and wrote with great skill and wonderful directness. But it is the sharp moral focus behind the vision that elevates the entertainment into literature.

—Claudia Levi

See the essay on " Georgy Porgy ."

" Dahl, Roald . " Reference Guide to Short Fiction . . Encyclopedia.com. 15 Apr. 2024 < https://www.encyclopedia.com > .

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"Dahl, Roald ." Reference Guide to Short Fiction . . Retrieved April 15, 2024 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/dahl-roald-0

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.

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A writer of both children's fiction and short stories for adults, Roald Dahl (1916-1990) is best known as the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the story of a poor boy who because of his honesty is selected by Willy Wonka to be the new owner of his world-famous chocolate factory. Dahl has been described as a master of story construction with a remarkable ability to weave a tale.

Dahl was born in Llandaff, South Wales, to Norwegian parents, and spent his childhood summers visiting his grandparents in Oslo, Norway. After his father died when Dahl was four, his mother abided by her late husband's wish that Dahl be sent to English schools. Dahl subsequently attended Llandaff Cathedral School, where he began a series of academic misadventures. After he and several other students were severely beaten by the headmaster for placing a dead mouse in a cruel store-keeper's candy jar, Dahl's mother moved him to St. Peter's Boarding School and later to Repton, a renowned private school. Dahl would later describe his school years as "days of horrors" which inspired much of his macabre fiction. 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. Dahl suffered severe head injuries in a plane crash near Alexandria, Egypt; upon recovering he was transferred to Washington, D.C., as an assistant air attache. There Dahl began his writing career, publishing a short story in the Saturday Evening Post. In 1961, he published his first work for children, James and the Giant Peach, and for the remainder of his life continued to write for both children and adults. He died in 1990.

Critical response to Dahl's children's books has varied from praising him as a genius to declaring his works racist and harmful. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is his most popular and most controversial children's story. Many critics have censured this work for its alleged stereotyping and inhumanity, and have accused Dahl of racism for his portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas: in the original version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they are described as black pygmies from deepest Africa who sing and dance and work for nearly nothing. In a revised edition, Dahl changed their appearance and gave them a mythical homeland. Dahl's supporters have argued that in Charlie, as in his other children's books, Dahl follows the traditional fairy tale style, which includes extreme exaggeration and the swift and horrible destruction of evildoers; they contend that children are not harmed by this approach.

Critics have compared Dahl's adult-oriented fiction to the works of Guy de Maupassant , O. Henry, and Saki. Praised by commentators as well crafted and suspenseful, Dahl's stories employ surprise endings and shrewd characters who are rarely what they seem to be. Of Dahl's work, Michael Wood has commented, "His stories are not only unfailingly clever, they are, many of them, about cleverness." Dahl also experimented with comic themes in his novel My Uncle Oswald. The title character, Oswald Hendryks Cornelius, is a charming man of the world who embarks upon a business venture to collect and preserve semen samples from geniuses and royalty, hoping to attract as clients wealthy women who desire superior offspring. Like Dahl's short stories, My Uncle Oswald features duplicitous characters, and some critics have observed that it shares a common theme with much of his short fiction: a depiction of the superficial nature of modern civilization.

Further Reading

Children's Literature Review, Gale, Volume 1, 1976, Volume 7, 1984.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973, Volume 6, 1976, Volume 18, 1981.

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

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

Dahl, Roald, Going Solo, Farrar, Straus, 1986.

Farrell, Barry, Pat and Roald, Random House, 1969.

McCann, Donnarae, and Gloria Woodard, editors, The Black American in Books for Children: Readings in Racism, Scare-crow, 1972. □

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"Roald Dahl ." Encyclopedia of World Biography . . Encyclopedia.com. (April 15, 2024). https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/roald-dahl

"Roald Dahl ." Encyclopedia of World Biography . . Retrieved April 15, 2024 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/roald-dahl

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• 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.

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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

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The best Roald Dahl books of all time, ranked

Entertain the kids (and yourself) with these brilliant Roald Dahl books.

Roald Dahl is one of the best-selling children’s authors of all time having sold approximately 250 million books worldwide - which makes our job of rounding up the top ten of the best Roald Dahl books pretty darn difficult.

However, we’ve decided to rise to the occasion because, thanks to a certain pandemic, we need all the entertainment we can get at the moment.

In the list below, you’ll find the classics we all know and love combined with a couple of more obscure options that will hopefully give you something new to read.

So, whether you’re just here for nostalgia’s sake, or are actually looking for books to read (or revisit) as a family - all, of course, with the charming illustrations by Quentin Blake

Here are the best Roald Dahl books we all need to read at least once in our lifetimes.

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Best Roald Dahl books of all time

1 . Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory may be Dahl’s best known stories. It’s a book that just appeals to every child’s imagination; a chocolate factory filled with chocolate and sweets, spies and mischievous Oompa-Loompas. And it seems the story was likely a long time coming because because Dahl even got the chance to be 'taste testers' for a chocolate company when attending Repton school in Derbyshire.

2 . Matilda

Having won the Children’s Book Award shortly after its release back in 1988, Matilda has continued to entertain children (and adults alike) for the last three decades. It has since become an award-winning film and (yes, you guessed it) an award-winning musical.

However, what stays the same is the story - Matilda Wormwood is a five-year-old genius, the only problem is that none of the adults in her life seem to appreciate it - that is until she meets her new teacher Miss Honey. Now, there’s just the small problem of headmistress Miss Trunchbull who loves to torment her, Miss Honey and the rest of the children.

3 . The Witches

The Witches tells the story of a brave young boy and his Norwegian grandmother as they battle England's witches who wish to rid the world of children. An usual quirk of this the heroes of this story - both the boy and his grandmother - remain nameless throughout the book. A word of warning before reading this one at bedtime, The Witches continues to top lists of the scariest children’s books around.

4 . Fantastic Mr Fox

Published in 1970, Fantastic Mr Fox tells the story of cunning Mr Fox and his family who continue to outwit three horrible farmers - Boggis, Bunce and Bean. Unfortunately, these farmers are not going to give up easily.

The story was inspired by the countryside near Dahl’s childhood home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire including a tree, known locally as ‘the witches’ tree’, which had a hole in the trunk, much like the Foxes’ home in the book. It’s also one of the few books to have the pleasure of being turned into a Wes Anderson film .

5 . The BFG

The BFG is definitely a book that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside - and supposedly, Dahl’s own favourite. The 1982 novel tells the story of a Big Friendly Giant who captures dreams in bottles so that he can make sure children can enjoy them while they sleep. When he makes friends with orphan Sophie (named after Dahl’s first grandchild) he takes her back to his cave in Giant Country and antics ensue.

6 . James and the Giant Peach

James doesn’t feel like he has a single friend in the whole wide world, or that is until he meets the Old Green Grasshopper and all his insect friends on a magical giant peach. This novel was first published way back in 1961 as Dahl’s first attempt at writing a story for children - and is now one of his most popular.

The book is dedicated to his two eldest daughters, Olivia and Tessa and the 1996 film of the book even features Simon Callow as a grasshopper and Richard Dreyfuss voicing a centipede - in case the story needed any more charm.

7 . Danny, the Champion of the World

Dahl loved to take his own life and put it into his own stories. For example, the caravan Danny and his dad live in, in this book, is based upon a real Roma caravan Dahl bought in the 1960s, which was used as a playroom for the children. The story itself is all about the father-son partnership of Danny and his dad, William against the local beer magnate Mr Hazell.

8 . The Twits

The Twits are probably some of Dahl’s least likeable characters he’s ever written. Mr Twit is described as having a dirty beard “with food clinging to it”, while his wife, Mrs Twit, is equally unlovely. They’re also not very fond of each other, which is where the chaos ensues as the pair start playing more and more tricks on each other. The book is apparently inspired by Dahl's hatred of beards.

9 . Esio Trot

One of Roald Dahl’s last stories, Esio Trot is about a shy old man’s undeclared love for his neighbour, Mrs Silver, and the lengths he goes to win her heart. Oh, and there’s a tortoise called Alfie, because what story isn’t made better by a tiny tortoise. Esio Trot was a favourite of the book’s illustrator Quentin Blake and he even narrates the audiobook.

10 . The Vicar of Nibbleswicke

The Vicar of Nibbleswicke is the only book on this list to be published after Dahl’s life. A more obscure choice but it’s another heart-warming one. Having been written to raise awareness around dyslexia, Dahl even auctioned all rights of the book to benefit The Dyslexia Institute before his death.

The book itself tells the story of Robert Lee, who, having suffered with severe dyslexia as a boy, successfully overcame his problems with the help of The Dyslexia Institute. Unfortunately, after arriving in Nibbleswicke as the town's new reverend, he develops a very unusual condition called Back-to-Front Dyslexia.

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FAMOUS AUTHORS

Roald Dahl was a British novelist, writer of short stories, screen writer and fighter pilot. He was born in Wales in 13th September 1916. Before writing he also served in the Air Force and fought in the World War two. He was a flying ace and also an intelligence agent. Known as one of the greatest storytellers for children, he was in the list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’.

Dahl went to The Cathedral School where corporal punishment was common. He also became victim to it several times for his mischievousness. As his father had considered English schools to be the best even after his death his mother abided by his wishes. He was then put into boarding school in England named Saint Peters. His time in Saint Peters is mentioned in his autobiography ‘Boy: Tales of Childhood’. In 1929 Dahl was shifted to Repton School in Derbyshire. This was where his writing skills first became noticed by his English teacher who said:

“I have never met anybody who so persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended.”

While he was studying at Repton, the chocolate company ‘Cadbury’ would send boxes of chocolate to there to get tasted. This is where Dahl took inspiration for his most notable work ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ which was published in 1963. Taking inspiration from his life incidence and people he met is very common in his writings. Another example of such inspiration is in his book ‘The Witches’ published in 1983 in which the main character is a Norwegian boy.

In 1934 he started working at the Shell Petroleum Company. After training two years in the UK he transferred to Kenya and then Daar-es-Salaam where he lived a very luxurious life due to his job. After serving in the Second World War, he married Patricia Neal in 1953. They remained married for thirty years and had five children after which they got divorced. His married life was filled with many unfortunate incidences such as the terrible accident of his four month old son and death of his seven years old daughter. His five had three burst cerebral aneurysms while pregnant for the fifth time. After his divorce Dahl married Felicity Crosland.

Dahl’s books involve imagination and fantasy and they were humorous too. His first book for children was ‘The Gremlins’. His book most loved by children is ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’. This was made into two films; one was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ in 1971 and ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ in 2005. Another famous work is ‘Matilda’ published in 1988 which was made into a movie in 1988. Some other books of Dahl are Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970) and the movie in 2009, ‘The Minpins’ (1991), ‘The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me’ (1985). Some short story collections are ‘Roald Book of Ghost Stories’ (1983), ‘Two Fables’ (1986), ‘The Roald Dahl Treasury’ (1997).

Roald Dahl died on 23rd November 1990 due to a blood disease in Oxford, England. There is a Roald Dahl Children’s Gallery opened in his honor.

Buy Books by Roald Dahl

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(1916-1990), British

Roald Dahl was an author, an ace fighter pilot, a spy, a medical inventor, and a chocolate historian. He is best known for his beloved children’s books such as ‘ Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ,’ ‘ Matilda ,’ ‘ The BFG ,’ and ‘ James and the Giant Peach .’

• Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, South Wales, on 13 September 1916.
• His parents, Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg were Norwegian.
• Dahl went to several boarding schools including St Peter’s, Weston-super-Mare, and Repton.
• In 1953, Dahl married Patricia Neal, an American actress with whom he had five children.
• Roald Dahl passed away on 23rd November 1990 at the age of 74.

Interesting Facts

• Roald Dahl was named after Roald Amundson, a Norwegian who was the first man to reach the South Pole.
• During his time at Repton, Dahl and other pupils were invited to try out chocolate bars – which eventually became the inspiration for ‘ Charlie and the Chocolate Factory .’
• Roald Dahl enlisted in the Royal Air Force at 23 years old.
• Dahl invented the Wade-Dahl-Till valve to alleviate head injuries in 1960.
• Dahl took part in the Battle of Athens in World War II and supplied intelligence to MI6.

Famous Books by Roald Dahl

‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ – Published in 1964, ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’  is one of Roald Dahl’s most famous novels. The book follows the story of a poor boy who wins the golden ticket to the factory of the famous chocolatier, Willy Wonka. Charlie, being a good-natured young boy wins a fantasy apprenticeship with the world’s greatest chocolatier. The rest of his peers, however, are not as lucky. Their selfishness and greed lead them down the wrong paths at the factory, and they meet sticky ends.

‘ Matilda ‘  – ‘ Matilda ‘ was the last long children’s book written by Roald Dahl in 1988. The story revolves around a 5-year-old girl with a genius intellect. Matilda also has magical powers. That is the ability to move objects with her mind. However, Matilda faces some big bullies in her life and attempts to overcome the problems they pose with her wit and talent. She meets a wonderful teacher along the way and learns important life lessons.

‘ The BFG’  – Published in 1982,  ‘The BFG ‘ serves as a testament to Roald Dahl’s quirky writing style and imaginative wordplay. The title of the novel stands for the big friendly giant that a young orphan girl meets and befriends. The young girl learns about the fascinating aspects of the universe from the BFG, including the origin of human dreams and the music that the stars in the sky above her produce.

‘James and the Giant Peach’  – ‘ James and the Giant Peach ‘ is one of the first children’s novels written by Roald Dahl. In this novel, the protagonist of the novel is a young boy named James who is terrorized day in and day out by his abusive aunts. James does not have a single friend until he meets a special insect – the Old Green Grasshopper. James, the Old Green Grasshopper, and the rest of his insect friends go aboard a giant, magical peach into the great unknown for a magical adventure.

Roald Dahl was born in 1916 in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales to Norwegian parents Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg. Dahl lost his sister Astri to appendicitis when he was just three years old. In the same year, his father passed away from pneumonia.

Dahl’s mother decided to bring him up in Wales and his earliest education was in English public schools. As a result, Dahl attended The Cathedral School at Llandaff then transferred to St Peter’s, a British boarding school in Weston-super-Mare. Dahl did not have a pleasant time in this boarding school. He was extremely homesick and wrote to his mother very often.

At the age of 13, Dahl attended Repton School in Derbyshire, England. Dahl disliked his time at Repton because of the hazing, cruelty, and status domination that prevailed there. Young boys at the school were subjected to corporal punishment and terrible beatings by teachers and older boys.

Dahl spent his summers in Oslo, Norway with his grandparents, where he made several happy memories.

Later Life and Death

After school, Dahl went on an expedition to Newfoundland before joining Shell Petroleum Company in 1934. Shell Oil Company assigned him to “wonderful faraway places” he wanted, such as Mombasa, Kenya, and then Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika (Tanzania, Africa).

In 1939, Dahl enlisted as a member of the Royal Air Force as an aircraftman. He became a pilot officer within six months and was assigned to a squadron. However, his aircraft crashed on a mission in Alexandria and he sustained several serious injuries including a fractured skull, a smashed nose, and temporary blindness. On 28 April 1941, Dahl took part in the Battle of Athens, and within a month, he was evacuated to Egypt.

Dahl tried to recover his health enough to become an instructor and took a job as an assistant air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington DC. Dahl met several people during his time at the embassy, including Lord Halifax and British novelist CS Forester.

During the war, Dahl worked as a spy – supplying intelligence to Stephenson and his organization, which was a part of MI6. He also supplied intelligence from Washington to Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

After the war, Roald Dahl married American actress Patricia Neal in 1953 with whom he had five children. Two of his children died of complications and diseases. Dahl and Neal divorced in 1983 when Dahl married Felicity d’Abreu Crosland.

During the later stages of his life, Dahl suffered from a cancer of the blood known as myelodysplastic syndrome. Cancer took his life on 23rd November 1990 where he was buried in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire at the age of 74. Dahl has left behind a huge legacy, of which the 1996 Roald Dahl Children’s Gallery and the Roald Dahl Funny Prize are just the tip of the iceberg.

Literary Career

Roald Dahl was regarded as “one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century” by  The Times . His literary career began with his first story ever, ‘ A Piece of Cake. ‘ The story was an account of his wartime adventures published in 1942 by the  Saturday Evening Post  under the title ‘ Shot Down Over Libya .’

His first children’s book,  ‘The Gremlins ,’ came out in 1943, but it was not a success. He had written the story for Walt Disney, to be turned into a movie. Dahl then began writing dark and macabre adult short stories which appeared in several American magazines such as  Harper’s, Playboy, The New Yorker , and so on. His short stories were extremely popular and he wrote more than 60 of them. They were anthologized in numerous short story collections including ‘ Skin ‘ , ‘Someone Like You ,’ and ‘ Tales of the Unexpected .’ As a short story writer, Dahl has come to be known as a “teller of the unexpected.’

Some of his most famous adult stories include ‘ The Smoker’  which was turned into an episode of ‘ Alfred Hitchcock Presents’  in 1985 as well as ‘ Four Rooms’  by Quentin Tarantino in 1995. Another popular short story was ‘ The Landlady .’ Dahl also wrote several novels for adults including ‘ My Uncle Oswald’, ‘Memories with Food at Gipsy House,’  and ‘ Esio Trot .’ He has also written an autobiography called ‘Boy: Tales of Childhood ,’ which recollects his adventures as a mischievous child.

Roald Dahl is most famous for his children’s fiction. These are whimsical fantasy stories written from the point of view of a child. As a children’s writer, some of the most famous of Dahl’s books include  ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,’ ‘Matilda,’ ‘The BFG,’ ‘The Witches,’ ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox,’ ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine,’ ‘Danny, Champion of the World ‘, and  ‘James and the Giant Peach.’

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.

Literary Influences

Roald Dahl is influenced by his favorite authors including Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Frederick Marryat, and William Makepeace Thackeray.

Dahl was also highly influenced by Lewis Carroll’s ‘ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ‘ and Jonas Lie’s ‘ Trolls .’ He was also inspired by his mother’s Norwegian stories and folk tales, as well as her magnetic storytelling.

Literature by Roald Dahl

Explore literature by Roald Dahl below, created by the team at Book Analysis.

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clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

Roald Dahl is as troubling as he is beloved. Can’t he be both?

The author of children’s favorites like ‘matilda’ was a complicated man. a new biography reminds us just how complicated..

In the brisk and concise “ Roald Dahl: Teller of the Unexpected ,” Matthew Dennison notes that the author of “ Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ,” “ The BFG ,” “ Matilda ” and much, much else has, according to the British journal the Bookseller, sold at least 250 million books in 58 languages.

That’s a phenomenal number, but just start almost any of Dahl’s books, then try to stop reading. I can testify to the tractor-beam power of his storytelling. After finishing Dennison’s biography, I decided to glance briefly at the opening chapters of “ The Witches ,” which I had reviewed, ecstatically, when it first appeared in 1983. When I finally lifted my eyes from the page, I was a quarter of the way through the novel, having been caught up all over again in its delicious scariness. Admittedly, “The Witches” remains my favorite among Dahl’s classics, closely followed by his 1988 paean to books and girl power, the wonderful “Matilda.” I didn’t reread it only because I had watched the exuberant — if overly dark — new film version instead. Like nearly all of Dahl’s best work, these two novels celebrate kindness, independent thought, daring, loyalty and self-reliance.

The disturbing Mr. Dahl

Without supplanting either Jeremy Treglown’s pioneering “ Roald Dahl: A Biography ” (1993) or Donald Sturrock’s authorized biography, “ Storyteller ” (2010) — both of which I recommend, especially the latter — this succinct new biography provides just enough information for all but the most ardent Dahl devotee. As in his previous lives of Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame, Dennison again reminds us that children’s authors are, to say the least, complicated people. Dahl, for instance, could face horrific life-or-death crises with heroic self-control, knowing precisely what needed to be done and doing it. In more ordinary circumstances, however, his need to dominate and take command wasn’t much different from that of his own villain, the controlling, paramilitary sadist Miss Trunchbull.

Yet Dahl remains a troubling, complicated figure. Waspishly opinionated, frequently offensive, a hard bargainer with publishers and swaggeringly obnoxious with his editors, he could also be irresistibly charming, outrageously funny and, in his younger days, a relentless Casanova. In later years, he transformed himself into a family man who was distinctly “sparky,” his own word from “ Danny the Champion of the World ” for what a father should be. Once, while his daughters Olivia and Tessa slept, Dahl wrote their names in weed killer on the lawn outside their bedroom window. “The following morning, he told them it was the work of fairies.” Throughout his life, the writer also practiced, without fanfare, what Dennison describes as “habitual generosity.” To this day, the Dahl estate continues to support specialist pediatric nurses and to underwrite research into neurological and blood diseases.

Born in 1916, Roald Dahl — named after the polar explorer Roald Amundsen — was only 3 when his Norwegian-born father died, leaving a sizable fortune (from shipping and coal). At the prestigious Repton School, young Roald displayed no talent whatsoever for writing. One school report reads: “A persistent muddler. Vocabulary negligible, sentences malconstructed.” After graduation, rather than go on to university, he eagerly took up a job with Shell Oil in Africa, then later joined the Royal Air Force during World War II, flying combat missions over Greece.

Why read old books? A case for the classic, the unusual, the neglected.

Because of head injuries from a crash, the handsome 6-foot-6 flying ace was eventually redeployed to D.C. as a kind of British goodwill ambassador. There, besides doing a bit of intelligence work, he regularly bedded pretty girls and rich society matrons. But his “lucky break” — as he later titled an autobiographical essay — came about after meeting the novelist C.S. Forester. The creator of Captain Horatio Hornblower asked Dahl to write up his crash in the Libyan desert and was so impressed by the result that he sent the piece to the Saturday Evening Post, where it was published on Aug. 1, 1942. Other successful tales about wartime flying soon followed and were collected in 1946 as “ Over to You .” But Dahl’s first novel, 1948’s post-apocalyptic “ Some Time Never ,” proved a disaster, and his second never quite jelled, which isn’t surprising given its tentative title, “Fifty Thousand Frogskins.”

In his 30s, Dahl found his niche as a moderately successful author of sleek, unsettling suspense stories, which he later dubbed “ Tales of the Unexpected .” In “Lamb to the Slaughter,” a wife who has killed her husband ingeniously disposes of the highly original murder weapon. In “Taste,” a wine connoisseur stakes his 18-year-old daughter in a bet with a lecherous middle-aged rival over the identification of an obscure vintage of Bordeaux. Upon reading these elegant contes cruels, compiled in the 1953 collection “ Someone Like You ,” Noël Coward praised Dahl’s imagination as “fabulous” but also noted “an underlying streak of cruelty and macabre unpleasantness, and a curiously adolescent emphasis on sex.” These traits would characterize all his work for adults, including the stories of 1960’s “ Kiss, Kiss ” and the ribald exploits chronicled in 1979’s “ My Uncle Oswald .”

Until 1953, Dahl lived at home in England with his mother, to whom, as Dennison repeatedly emphasizes, he was close all his life. That year, though, he met and successfully wooed the American actress Patricia Neal. Their marriage, though rocky at first, lasted for 30 years, despite several terrible crises, including a traumatic brain injury to their infant son Theo and the death from measles of 7-year-old Olivia. When Neal suffered a debilitating stroke at just 39, Dahl personally oversaw an intense program of therapy and rehabilitation.

It was during these tumultuous years that he turned to writing for children. Dahl was 48 when his first masterpiece, “ James and the Giant Peach ,” appeared in 1961. Like his eerie adult stories of revenge and comeuppance, his children’s books required many drafts, scribbled longhand on yellow legal pads. He confessed that “when I first thought about writing the book ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,’ I never originally meant to have children in it at all.” On a rejected draft, Charlie was Black.

Roald Dahl was anti-Semitic. Do we need his family’s apology now?

In his mid-50s, Dahl began an extended affair with the 20-years-younger Felicity Crosland, a friend of Neal. After much angst all around and a bitter divorce, Crosland became his second wife. The marriage proved a happy one, leading to the great works of the 1980s: “The BFG,” “The Witches,” “Matilda” and the delightful, highly embroidered memoirs “ Boy ” and “ Going Solo .” When Dahl died of a rare blood cancer in 1990 at age 74, reprints of his books described him as the world’s No. 1 storyteller.

Reflecting on his work, Dahl once inventoried what children most enjoy in fiction: “They love being spooked. They love suspense. They love action. They love ghosts. They love the finding of treasure. They love chocolates and toys and money. They love magic.” Dahl’s books duly supply all these, as well as plenty of rowdy, Dickensian gusto and tall-tale exaggeration. What’s more, his stories don’t flinch from the rude body humor — flatulence, belching, smelly feet, mock vomiting — that children find so funny. Even the nastiness of Dahl’s villains is deliberately over the top so that the young hero or heroine’s ultimate triumph may be all the more satisfying to child readers. Above all, though, Dahl resolutely eschews overt moralizing: “There are very few messages in these books of mine. They are there simply to turn the child into a reader of books.”

Yet to adult eyes, Dahl frequently goes uncomfortably too far in depicting an anarchic Hobbesian world of savagery and violence. When “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” first appeared in 1964, the Oompa Loompas were racist caricatures of African pygmies (though later changed to hippie-ish, rosy-skinned dwarfs). The depiction of Veruca Salt’s father, in that same book, sails close to Jewish stereotypes. Not least, while Dahl defended his notorious “anti-Israeli” political views as justifiable anger over that nation’s treatment of the Palestinian people, many felt this argument was a cover for antisemitism.

Rudyard Kipling has been called the most controversial writer in modern English literature. Sometimes I suspect that Roald Dahl must run him a close second. Still, in the end, our dealings as readers aren’t with authors, all of whom are flawed human beings, but with their books. Our lives would certainly be poorer without Dahl’s tender portrait of the love between a father and his son in “Danny the Champion of the World” or the inspiring fairy tales of “The BFG” and “Matilda.” Even the critic Kathryn Hughes, who once called Dahl “an absolute sod,” concluded, quite rightly, that “despite so many reasons to dislike him,” he nonetheless remains “one of the greatest forces for good in children’s literature of the past 50 years.”

Teller of Unexpected Tales

By Matthew Dennison

Pegasus. 272 pp. $27.95

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The 7 best Roald Dahl movies, ranked

Devan Coggan (rhymes with seven slogan) is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly. Most of her personality is just John Mulaney quotes and Lord of the Rings references.

Roald Dahl was many things—including a fighter pilot, a screenwriter, and a novelist—but he is undoubtedly best known as the man who introduced us to unforgettable characters like the eccentric Willy Wonka, the brilliant Matilda, and the cunning Mr. Fox. As one of the most iconic children's authors of all time, Dahl imbued all of his stories with a sense of imagination and wonder—and, more often than not, a little bit of nastiness. Dahl may have written about witches, giants, and anthropomorphic bugs, but all of his characters have a richness that makes them extraordinarily human.

So, it's no wonder that Hollywood has mined Dahl's extensive bibliography to create some of the greatest book-to-movie adaptations of all time and EW decided to rank the seven best. (This doesn't include his original scripts like 1968's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and we decided to focus only on theatrical releases, excluding made-for-TV adaptations like the 1989 film Danny, the Champion of the World, starring Jeremy Irons and Robbie Coltrane , and 2015's Esio Trott , starring Judi Dench and Dustin Hoffman , as well as streaming releases like 2020's remake of The Witches .)

Read on for our ranking of seven timeless Dahl movies.

7. The BFG (2016)

This Dahl adaptation hit theaters in 2016, with Oscar winner Mark Rylance bringing the titular Big Friendly Giant to the big screen with his cow eyes, lanky limbs, and enormous ears. After spying the extra-large intruder outsider her window, charming orphan Sophie (played by Ruby Barnhill) is whisked away into Giant Country—a land of bone-crushing giants, bottled dreams, and stinky snozzcumbers.

You'd think a mix of Steven Spielberg and Dahl would be an automatic slam dunk, but this version doubles down on the gorgeous, eye-popping visuals—at the expense of the story. The best Dahl tales have a slightly sinister undertone, and The BFG takes a more neutered, childish approach. (What set Dahl apart was his ability to write for children without talking down to them.) The result is a pleasant enough yet forgettable film.

6. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

Of the two movies based on Dahl's most beloved book, Tim Burton 's 2005 version sticks a little closer to the original story than the 1971 Gene Wilder musical, even if Johnny Depp 's Willy Wonka is a childlike candy entrepreneur who's part Michael Jackson , part Anna Wintour , and part Howard Hughes. As the misanthropic Wonka, Depp takes Charlie ( Freddie Highmore ) and his four spoiled companions on a wild and frequently dangerous tour of his crazy confectionery, including blueberry explosions, live squirrels, and, of course, Oompa Loompas.

Is it as heartfelt as the Wilder version? Not even close. (Don't even get us started on the nonsensical "dentist" backstory.) But Burton puts his own twisted spin on the Dahl classic for a film that's occasionally sour and often sweet.

5. The Witches (1990)

There are plenty of terrifying antagonists in all of Dahl's work—as a child, I had nightmares about the Vermicious Knids from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator —but few are as chilling as the Grand High Witch and her coven of infanticidal witches. Our heroes are the tiny Luke (Jasen Fisher) and his grandmother Helga (Mai Zetterling), who visit a seaside hotel only to accidentally stumble upon a meeting of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children—a.k.a. the annual meeting of all the witches in England. When they find Luke listening in on their evil machinations, they turn him into a mouse, and it's up to Luke and his grandmother to take on the witches once and for all.

The Man Who Fell to Earth director Nicolas Roeg helmed this Dahl adaptation, with help from Jim Henson 's Creature Shop and their delightfully wacky effects. Anjelica Huston is at her most sinister and dramatic as the villainous Grand High Witch, and The Witches captures both the hilarity and horror of Dahl's best ( which wasn't executed as well in the 2020 remake ).

4. James and the Giant Peach (1996)

Dahl imbued all of his stories with some sense of magic, but James and the Giant Peach is perhaps the most outright fantastical. So, it's no wonder that director Henry Selick ( The Nightmare Before Christmas ) decided to tackle these bugs, pirates, and robotic sharks with a clever mix of live action and stop-motion animation.

Poor James (voiced by Paul Terry) lives with his horrifying aunts, Spiker and Sponge (voiced by Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes ), but his luck changes when he's given a bag of mysterious "crocodile tongues," which he inadvertently spills in his garden. Soon, the barren peach tree in his yard sprouts the largest peach in the world, and when James crawls inside, he meets a group of enormous, anthropomorphic, and rather polite bugs, who join him on an airborne adventure across the Atlantic Ocean.

The gorgeous animation lends an otherworldly and zany edge to Dahl's twisted tale, plus there's a stellar voice cast including Richard Dreyfuss , Susan Sarandon , and David Thewlis . James and the Giant Peach is one of Dahl's most peculiar and macabre stories, and the film perfectly channels that outlandish atmosphere.

3. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)

Dahl himself wasn't a fan of Mel Stuart's 1971 musical and how it deviated from the book, and, to be fair, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is not quite a faithful adaptation. Rather than focusing on the downtrodden Charlie Bucket (after all, the book is titled Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, not Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory ), the film turned its eye to the mysterious chocolate genius behind it all, played brilliantly by Gene Wilder.

Most things are the same: The unfortunate Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum) is one of five children to win a golden ticket to visit Wonka's magical chocolate factory, and, along the way, his spoiled companions get picked off one by one by tumbling into the chocolate river, falling down a garbage chute, and more. But the film is actually stronger for deviating from the source material, and Wilder brought an unsettling sense of mystery to his role, oscillating between delightful and menacing. Both the book and the film are excellent, for different reasons, but they can both take you to a world of pure imagination.

2. The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Most of Dahl's heroes are small children, but Wes Anderson 's meticulous stop-motion masterpiece puts Mr. Fox front and center, voiced to cussing perfection by George Clooney . As the patriarch of the Fox family, Mr. Fox earns a living by stealing from the cruel and foolish farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean. When the farmers set their sights on Fox, he engineers a devious plan of retaliation, recruiting his woodland neighbors for help. (The stacked voice cast includes Meryl Streep , Bill Murray , Jason Schwartzman , Willem Dafoe , Owen Wilson , and more.)

Anderson's obsession with detail means that he's the perfect director to tackle this whimsical tale, one that's part endearing fable, part madcap heist. Not only are the four-legged characters relatable and the sets astonishingly detailed, but Fantastic Mr. Fox triumphantly captures the spirit of Dahl's original book.

1. Matilda (1996)

As a precocious young elementary schooler, the titular Matilda ( Mara Wilson ) is a genius, but her ignorant parents (played by Rhea Perlman and an excellent Danny DeVito , who also directed) refuse to acknowledge her brilliance. Matilda puts her brain to work by devising brilliant forms of revenge on her parents or spending her days at the local library, but by the time she enters school, her brain power is seriously underused. Her kind teacher, Miss Honey ( Embeth Davidtz ), recognizes Matilda's potential, but she and the rest of the school live in constant fear of the tyrannical headmistress Miss Trunchbull (Pam Ferris). Intellectually bored and frustrated by her oppressive school, Matilda eventually discovers that she can manifest her unused brain power as telekinesis, and she soon puts her newly discovered powers to work.

Dahl wrote about many clever, misfit children facing off against cruel and ignorant adults, but none were ever as delightful or relatable as Matilda, the telekinetic bookworm . The 1996 film is a near-perfect adaptation of the book, encapsulating Dahl's signature tone and how it so effortlessly balanced the comedic, the sadistic, and the heartfelt. It's also the reason we'll never be able to think of chocolate cake in the same way again.

A movie musical adaptation of the stage musical Matilda the Musical (which is, itself, an adaptation of Dahl's book) will be released on Netflix in December 2022.

Related Articles

Roald Dahl Fans

Fan site for author Roald Dahl (1916-1990)

Biographies

This is a list of books that other people have written about Roald Dahl. If you know of one that’s not listed here, please email me!

Major Biographies

• Authoritative biography by Jeremy Treglown
• MY VERDICT: “A must–read for any serious Dahl fan.”
• Written by Donald Sturrock
• MICHAEL’S VERDICT: “A real page-turner that offers insight into Roald Dahl’s personality not available anywhere else. The author, who met Roald Dahl numerous times, has done his research and offered a new perspective and view on Roald Dahl.”
• Written by Jennet Conant

Other Biographies

• Written by Victoria Parker
• Autobiography written by Patricia Neal, Dahl’s wife of 30 years
• MY VERDICT: “Provides necessary contrast for much of what’s written about Dahl. Though much of the book deals with Neal’s affair with Gary Cooper (before she met Dahl), the last half provides a gripping and personal look at the famous author from the person who probably knew him best.”
• Written by Andrew Donkin
• Illustrated by Clive Goddard
• Published subsequently as Roald Dahl and his Chocolate Factory (Horribly Famous) and Roald Dahl’s Life in Stories
• MY VERDICT: “This is a great introduction to Dahl’s life for a young reader (or an adult who’s a kid at heart). Not only is it packed with information, but the many cartoons, comics, and jokes keep the mood light and fun. At the same time, though, it doesn’t gloss over some of the more negative aspects of his life. I recommend it.”
• Written by Jason Hook
• Written by Michael Rosen
• Written by Frances E. Ruffin
• Written by Rennay Craats
• Published subsequently as  Roald Dahl (Remarkable Writers)
• Written by Barry Farrell
• Made into TV–movie entitled The Patricia Neal Story in 1981
• MY VERDICT: “This book was written by a journalist in close contact with the Dahl family and chronicles the period following Patricia Neal’s strokes. Popularized the idea that Dahl’s ‘tough love’ is what ultimately enabled Neal to make a full recovery. She later used her autobiography As I Am to counter many of Farrell’s statements that she felt were unfair. It’s interesting reading, at any rate, and would be especially useful to anyone related to a stroke victim.”
• Biography written by Stephen Michael Shearer about Patricia Neal, Dahl’s wife of 30 years
• Written by Chris Powling
• Published subsequently as  Roald Dahl: A Biography and  Tell Me About: Roald Dahl
• Written by Charlotte Guillain
• Written by Jill C. Wheeler
• Written by Jane Bingham
• Written by Emma Fischel
• Also published as  The Life of Roald Dahl: A Marvellous Adventure
• Written by Haydn Middleton
• Written by Adam Woog
• Written by Ann Gaines
• Written by Alan Warren
• Written by Mark I. West
• Written by Jennifer Boothroyd
• Written by Michelle M. Houle
• Written by Andrea Shavick
• Published subsequently as  Roald Dahl: True Lives (True Lives Series)
• MY VERDICT: “Colorful and easy to read, this bio is great for younger children curious about the man who wrote their favorite books.”
• Written by True Kelley
• Written by Charles J. Shields
• Written by daughter Tessa Dahl
• Supposedly a novel, it’s actually a thinly–disguised autobiography of her childhood
• MY VERDICT: “A rather tawdry read. Not very successful as a novel, and not much better as an autobiography. Basically it’s all about the feelings of inadequacy that Tessa formed in childhood as a result of her dead sister, impaired mother, and overbearing father. It is interesting to hear a kid’s perspective on those tumultuous years, though.”

Wealth of Geeks

The Best Roald Dahl Movies to Ever Hit The Screen

Posted: March 14, 2024 | Last updated: March 14, 2024

Release of the critically acclaimed film Wonka , an origin story based on Roald Dahl’s signature 1961 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , shows that the author (and Roald Dahl movies) still has a grip on the public imagination over 30 years after his death.

Dahl’s many children’s books – among them, James and the Giant Peach , The Witches , Matilda , The BFG , and Fantastic Mr. Fox – championed kindness and decency but were, like the Mary Poppins novels of P.L. Travers, rigorously unsentimental, hewing closely to author G.K. Chesterton’s adage that “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” In Dahl’s case, those dragons were almost always villainous, brutish adults brought down by the children they despised and abused.

As one of the world’s best-selling authors, Dahl’s books and stories have had an irresistible allure for filmmakers. But as this list shows, Roald Dahl movies have had varying results.

( NB . Dahl also wrote several original screenplays, two of which were based on novels by his friend and fellow intelligence officer Ian Fleming).

Matilda (1996)

Derived from one of Dahl’s best-loved books, about a precocious young girl who uses her telekinetic powers to thwart the villainous adults in her life, Matilda drew criticism from some who felt director Danny DeVito and writers Nicholas Kazan and Robin Swicord had over-Americanized the material. And true enough, all the characters (with the exception of Miss Trunchbull, played by Welsh actress Pam Ferris) are American, and the action shifts to an unspecified stateside location.

But with a spirited performance from the nine-year-old Mara Wilson at its heart, the film fully captures the novel’s rebellious exuberance even if it loses some of its quintessential Englishness.

James and the Giant Peach (1996)

So deliriously strange is James and the Giant Peach – a young boy, terrorized by two frightful aunts, escapes in a piece of gigantic airborne fruit, and flies it from England to New York, accompanied by a crew of man-sized talking insects  – only director Henry Selick ( The Nightmare Before Christmas , Coraline ) and his sorcerer’s touch with stop-motion animation could’ve brought it to the screen with sufficiently bizarre panache.

Dahl refused to countenance a film version of James during his lifetime, but following his death in 1990, his wife Lucy gave the project her blessing. She later proclaimed it “A wonderful film,” adding that Roald “would have been delighted.” Which gratifies in one sense but disappoints in another. One can only wonder what Dahl and Selick might’ve cooked up if given the chance to work together.

The Witches (1990)

Fabulous prosthetics and puppetry from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop ( The Witches was Henson’s last feature) combine with Angelica Huston’s gloriously villainous performance, sympathetic direction from veteran Brit auteur Nicolas Roeg, and stunning art direction from John King and Norman Dorme for a comedy-fantasy-horror masterpiece.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

More stop-motion, and more input from the fantastic Mr. Selick, although he quit as animation supervisor mid-way through production to take the reins of Coraline .

Even so, Wes Anderson’s film, co-written with frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach, offers up a typically quirky concoction, brimming with classic storybook visuals and the director’s trademark wry wit. It’s also further compelling evidence that Roald Dahl movies – liberally expanded here by Anderson and Baumbach – lend themselves particularly well to both animation and idiosyncratic directors of a similarly mischievous mindset. 

Danny, the Champion of the World (1989)

A charming, touching and unerringly faithful adaptation of Dahl’s 1975 novel, Danny stars Jeremy Irons as a widowed father who bonds with his young son by teaching him the (ig)noble art of pheasant poaching. Suffused with nostalgia and Dahl’s deep love for the English countryside, it plays as old-fashioned family entertainment entirely unsullied by ostentatious special effects or Hollywood gloss.

The BFG (1989)

Made by British animation studio Cosgrove Hall Productions (makers of classic kids’ shows Danger Mouse and Count Duckula ), this delightful adaptation of Dahl’s 1982 novel had the full – and highly unusual – support of the author.

Dahl encouraged the filmmakers to base the character of Lucy, the little girl who befriends the giant, on his granddaughter (writer and former fashion model Sophie Dahl), hence her bobbed hair and large granny glasses. Much to director Brian Cosgrove’s relief, the finished film met with the entire Dahl family’s approval. He later recalled the standing ovation they gave it following its first London screening.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023)

Wes Anderson sprinkles more magic on this unassuming, almost theatrical adaptation of Dahl’s short story. Benedict Cumberbatch stars as a self-centered millionaire who learns a shaman’s trick to cheat at cards and ends up becoming one of the world’s great philanthropists. Appealing, funny, and odd: Roald Dahl movies in a nutshell.

Matilda the Musical (2022)

A rare remake that fully lives up to the original, probably because it’s not a remake at all but a rip-roaring reinvention of Dahl’s novel based on the hit West End show. Tremendous fun, bursting with catchy songs and dazzling choreography, it’s a salutary lesson for anyone attempting to adapt a stage musical into a movie.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

To some, director Mel Stuart’s take on Dahl’s seminal 1961 novel is a timeless classic, a fun singalong to four awful kids (and one nice one) getting their just desserts (pun intended). To others it’s a trippy, dayglo fever dream with Gene Wilder ­– horribly miscast – playing a glassy-eyed, manic version of Wonka that’s a million miles from the puckish eccentric of the book.

Dahl penned the original script himself, but it suffered so many tortured rewrites on its way to the screen he ended up disowning it, spawning a lifelong aversion to movie adaptations of his work. 

The BFG (2016)

A well-intentioned live-action remake from Steven Spielberg that, for reasons not easy to fathom, just doesn’t have the charm of the 1989 animated version. It looks gorgeous, the CG is breathtaking (it’s Spielberg, after all), and the performances from Mark Rylance as the titular big guy and Ruby Barnhill as his diminutive sidekick Sophie (a nod to Sophie Dahl) are terrific. But the all-important extra dash of wonder unaccountably goes AWOL.

Esio Trot (2015)

By the time he got round to 1990’s Esio Trot , his last novel, Dahl had mellowed. The weirdness and menace of his best work bows out to cozy domesticity and the sentimental tale of a retired bachelor who falls in love with his middle-aged widow neighbor whose pet tortoise provides both the title (think about it) and a welcome touch of whimsy.

The TV movie adaptation, written by Richard Curtiss and Paul Mayhew-Archer, directed by Dearbhla Walsh, and starring Dustin Hoffman and Judi Dench, certainly has its charms, chiefly the gentle comic script and excellent performances of the two leads. But die-hard fans of Roald Dahl movies will wait for a macabre twist that never comes. 

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

Roald Dahl and Tim Burton: indeed a marriage made in heaven. As with Henry Selick (Burton’s fellow Disney reject and sometime collaborator), it’s tempting to imagine what these two kindred spirits could’ve achieved if they’d put their heads together. Who knows, maybe they could even have saved this movie.

Then again, given its conspicuous lack of charm, numbing overuse of CGI, grating musical numbers, and a performance from Johnny Depp described by critics Chloe Roberts and Darren Horne as a “genetic mutation of Michael Jackson and the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, ” maybe not.

You Only Live Twice (1967)

Dahl came on to write the fifth Bond movie after the studio rejected the original script by Sydney Boehm. After dismissing his old friend I an Fleming’s source novel as the worst book he ever wrote, Dahl proceeded to write a script that bore almost no relation to it whatsoever. The results, which finds 007 in Japan, battling his old nemesis SPECTRE, were patchy, to say the least (that Dahl had virtually no previous experience as a screenwriter probably didn’t help).

The New York Times ’ Bosley Crowther concluded a typically verbose review with the words “majestically absurd.” Clifford Terry of the Chicago Tribune was less kind. “Roald Dahl’s script is larded with sex-slanted jokes that are either pathetically feeble or sophomorically coarse,” he wrote. “Bond’s patented puns are punier and even Connery’s enthusiasm for his shrewd, suave, and sensual character seems to have waned.” Dahl was not invited to write a Bond movie again.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)

Dahl’s second bite at a Fleming novel could hardly be more different. Or more disappointing.

Again, a frothy feelgood treat for some, but for anyone with even half their critical faculties about them, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang comes off as a tin-eared, saccharine-sweet throwback to the dying days of the Hollywood musical – the female lead is called Truly Scrumptious for god’s sake!

A creaky, corny affront to Fleming’s excellent children’s book, which boasts gangsters and gunrunners as well as a flying car, the film has one thing and one thing only going for it: the trauma-inducing Child Catcher, played to the poker-faced sinister hilt by Austrian actor and ballet dancer Robert Helpmann.

The Witches (2020)

An unforgivably flat remake of the 1990 classic, even with Anne Hathaway’s unhinged performance as the Grand High Witch can’t muster an iota of its forebears magic. “Nicolas Roeg’s version may have scarred a generation of kids for life,” wrote Indiewire ’s  David Ehrlich, saddling the Robert Zemeckis-directed dud with a D+, “but at least they remembered it.”

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