Roald Dahl (1916 – 1990)

Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Wales to Norwegian parents, Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl (née Hesselberg). He was named after the explorer Roald Amundsen, a national hero in Norway at the time.

In 1920, when Roald was still only three years old, his seven-year-old sister, Astri Dahl, died from appendicitis. A few weeks later his father Harald died of pneumonia at the age of 57. Nevertheless, his mother was determined to keep the family in Britain rather than head back to Norway and live with her relatives, because of her husband's wish to have their children educated in English schools.

Because the family still lived in Wales, Roald first attended Llandaff Cathedral School.

At the age of eight, Roald and four of his friends were caned by the headmaster after putting a dead mouse in a jar of sweets at the local sweet shop owned by a "mean and loathsome" old woman called Mrs. Pratchett. Thereafter he was sent to several boarding schools, which was undoubtedly an unpleasant experience.

He was educated at Repton School in Derbyshire and during his years there, Cadbury, a chocolate company, would occasionally send boxes of new chocolates to the school to be tested by the pupils. Dahl himself apparently used to dream of inventing a new chocolate bar that would win the praise of Mr. Cadbury himself, and this proved the inspiration for him to write his second book for children, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

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

After finishing his schooling, he spent three weeks hiking through Newfoundland with a group called the Public Schools' Exploring Society. In July 1934 he joined the Shell Petroleum Company.

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

It was soon after this incident, in November 1939, that he joined the Royal Air Force. On September 19, 1940, Dahl was forced to attempt a landing in the desert and the plane crashed, fracturing his skull, smashing his nose in, and blinding him. He managed to drag himself away from the blazing wreckage and passed out. Later, he wrote about the crash for his first published work.

Dahl was rescued and taken to a first-aid post where he fell in love with a nurse, Mary Welland, who was the first person he saw when he regained his sight after eight weeks. The doctors said he had no chance of flying again, but in February 1941, five months after he was admitted to the hospital, he was discharged and passed fully fit for flying duties. He later saw service in Syria and then worked for military intelligence. He ended the war as a Wing Commander.

He began writing when in 1942 he was transferred to Washington as Assistant Air Attache. His first work was published in the August 1, 1942 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, titled Shot Down Over Libya, describing his crash.

He was married for 30 years (1953-83) to American actress Patricia Neal (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Hud, The Subject Was Roses, A Face in the Crowd, and Breakfast at Tiffany's, a rare comedy for Neal). They had five children, one of whom, Olivia Twenty Dahl, died of measles encephalitis at the age of 7 in 1962. His daughter Tess Dahl is an author. Theo, his only son, was involved in an accident as an infant and went on to develop hydrocephalus: as a result, his father became involved in the development of what became known as the *Wade-Dahl-Till (WDT) valve, a device to alleviate the condition. His daughter Ophelia Dahl is director and cofounder (with doctor Paul Farmer) of Partners in Health, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing health care to some of the most impoverished communities in the world. Tessa's daughter and inspiration for the "helpmate" character in The BFG is model and author Sophie Dahl. In 1983 he married Felicity Ann d'Abreu Crosland, his former wife's former best friend.

He died of leukemia on November 23, 1990, at his home, Gipsy House, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, at the age of 74, and is buried in the cemetery at the parish church of St Peter and St Paul there. In his honor, the Roald Dahl Children's Gallery was opened at Bucks County Museum in nearby Aylesbury. Dahl's charitable commitments in the fields of neurology, hematology, and literacy have been continued after his death by his literary estate, through the Roald Dahl Foundation. In June 2005 the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre opened in Great Missenden to celebrate the work of Roald Dahl and advance his work in literacy.

His first children's book was The Gremlins, about mischievous little creatures that were part of RAF folklore. The book was commissioned by Walt Disney for a film that was never made and published in 1943. Dahl went on to create some of the best-loved children's stories of the 20th century, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and James and the Giant Peach.

He also had a successful parallel career as the writer of macabre adult short stories, usually with a dark sense of humor and a surprise ending. Many were originally written for American magazines such as Ladies Home Journal, Harper's, Playboy, and The New Yorker, then subsequently collected by Dahl into anthologies, gaining world-wide acclaim for the author. Dahl wrote more than 60 short stories and they have appeared in numerous collections, some only being published in book form after his death.

For a brief period in the 1960s Dahl wrote screenplays to make money. Two of his screenplays—the James Bond film You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang—were adaptations of novels by Ian Fleming, and he adapted his own work into Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971).

Memories with Food at Gipsy House, written with his wife Felicity and published posthumously in 1991, is a mixture of recipes, family reminiscences, and Dahl's musings on favorite culinary subjects such as chocolate, onions, and claret.

Dahl's works for children are usually told from the point of view of a child, typically involve adult villainesses, who hate and mistreat children, and feature at least one "good" adult to counteract the villain(s). They usually contain a lot of black humor and grotesque scenarios, including gruesome violence. The Witches and Matilda are two examples of this formula. The BFG follows it in a more analogical way with the good giant (the BFG or "Big Friendly Giant") representing the "good adult" archetype and the other giants being the "bad adults". This formula is also somewhat evident in Dahl's film script for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.