Roald Dahl 13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter.

Born in Llandaff, Wales to Norwegian parents, Dahl served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, in which he became a flying ace. He also served as a brilliant spy of legendary tales ^[2]. He rose to prominence in the 1940s with works for both children and adults, and became one of the world's bestselling authors. His short stories are known for their unexpected endings, and his children's books for their unsentimental, often very dark humour.

Some of his most popular books include The Twits, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Matilda, The Witches, and The BFG.

Biography

Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales in 1916, to Norwegian parents, Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl (née Hesselberg). Dahl's father had moved from Norway and settled in Cardiff in the 1880s, and his mother came over to marry his father in about 1910. Roald was named after the polar explorer Roald Amundsen, a national hero in Norway at the time. He spoke Norwegian at home with his parents and sisters, Astri, Alfhild, and Else. Dahl and his sisters were christened at the Norwegian Church, Cardiff, where their parents worshipped.

In 1920, when Roald was still only three years old, his seven-year-old sister, Astri, died from appendicitis. Just weeks later, his father died of pneumonia at the age of 57, following grief from his daughter's death. Dahl's mother, however, decided not to return to Norway to live with her relatives, but to remain in Wales since it had been her husband's wish to have their children educated in British schools as he felt they were the best in the world.

Dahl first attended The Cathedral School, Llandaff. At the age of eight, he 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, which was owned by a "mean and loathsome" old woman called Mrs Pratchett (wife of blacksmith David Pratchett). This was known amongst the five boys as the "Great Mouse Plot of 1924". This was Roald's own idea.

Thereafter, he was sent to several boarding schools in England, including Saint Peter's in Weston-super-Mare. His parents had wanted Roald to be educated at a British public school and at the time, due to a then regular boat link across the Bristol Channel, this proved to be the nearest. His time at Saint Peter's was an unpleasant experience for him. He was very homesick and wrote to his mother almost every day, but never revealed to her his unhappiness, being under the pressure of school censorship. Only after her death in 1967 did he find out that she had saved every single one of his letters, in small bundles held together with green tape. He later attended Repton School in Derbyshire, where, according to his autobiography Boy, a friend named Michael was viciously caned by headmaster Geoffrey Fisher, the man who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury and crowned the Queen in 1953. (However, according to Dahl's biographer Jeremy Treglown,^[3] the caning took place in May 1933, a year after Fisher had left Repton. The headmaster concerned was in fact J.T. Christie, Fisher's successor.) This caused Dahl to "have doubts about religion and even about God".^[4]

Dahl was very tall, reaching 6'6" (1.98m) in adult life,^[5] and he was good at sports, being made captain of the school fives and squash teams, and also playing for the football team. This helped his popularity. He developed an interest in photography. During his years there, Cadbury, the 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 third book for children, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was released in 1963 and he also included references to chocolate in other books for children.^[6]

Throughout his childhood and adolescent years, Dahl spent his summer holidays with his mother's family in their native Norway, mostly enjoying the fjords. His childhood and first job selling kerosene in Midsomer Norton and surrounding villages in Somerset are 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 (now known as BSES Expeditions). In July 1934, he joined the Shell Petroleum Company.

Following two years of training in the UK, he was transferred to Dar-es-Salaam, Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Along with the only two other Shell employees in the entire territory, he lived in luxury in the Shell House outside Dar-es-Salaam, with a cook and personal servants. While out on assignments supplying oil to customers across Tanganyika, he encountered black mambas and lions, amongst other wildlife.^[4]

World War II

In August 1939, as World War II impended, plans were made to round up the hundreds of Germans in Dar-es-Salaam. Dahl was made an officer in the King's African Rifles, commanding a platoon of askaris, indigenous troops serving in the colonial army.

In November 1939, Dahl joined the Royal Air Force. After a 600-mile (970 km) car journey from Dar-es-Salaam to Nairobi, he was accepted for flight training with 20 other men, and was one of only three who survived the war, as the other 17 died in combat. With seven hours and 40 minutes experience in a De Havilland Tiger Moth, he flew solo; Dahl enjoyed watching the wildlife of Kenya during his flights. He continued on to advanced flying training in Iraq, at RAF Habbaniya, 50 miles (80 km) west of Baghdad. Following six months training on Hawker Harts, Dahl was made a Pilot Officer.

He was assigned to No. 80 Squadron RAF, flying obsolete Gloster Gladiators, the last biplane fighter plane used by the RAF. Dahl was surprised to find that he would not receive any specialised training in aerial combat, or in regard to flying Gladiators. On 19 September 1940, Dahl was ordered to fly his Gladiator from Abu Sueir in Egypt, on to Amiriya to refuel, and again to Fouka in Libya for a second refuelling. From there he would fly to 80 Squadron's forward airstrip 30 miles (48 km) south of Mersa Matruh. On the final leg, he could not find the airstrip and, running low on fuel and with night approaching, he was forced to attempt a landing in the desert. The undercarriage hit a boulder and the plane crashed, fracturing his skull, smashing his nose, and temporarily 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 in Mersa Matruh, where he regained consciousness, but not his sight, and was then taken by train to the Royal Navy hospital in Alexandria. There he fell in and out of love with a nurse, Mary Welland. Dahl had fallen in love with her voice while he was blind, but once he regained his sight, he decided that he no longer loved her. An RAF inquiry into the crash revealed that the location he had been told to fly to was completely wrong, and he had mistakenly been sent instead to the no man's land between the Allied and Italian forces.^[7]

In February 1941, Dahl was discharged and passed fully fit for flying duties. By this time, 80 Squadron had been transferred to the Greek campaign and based at Eleusina, near Athens. The squadron was now equipped with Hawker Hurricanes. Dahl flew a replacement Hurricane across the Mediterranean Sea in April 1941, after seven hours flying Hurricanes. By this stage in the Greek campaign, the RAF had only 18 combat planes in Greece: 14 Hurricanes and four Bristol Blenheim light bombers. Dahl saw his first aerial combat on 15 April 1941, while flying alone over the city of Chalcis. He attacked six Junkers Ju-88s that were bombing ships and shot one down. On 16 April in another air battle, he shot down another Ju-88.

On 20 April 1941, Dahl took part in the "Battle of Athens", alongside the highest-scoring British Commonwealth ace of World War II, Pat Pattle and Dahl's friend David Coke. Of 12 Hurricanes involved, five were shot down and four of their pilots killed, including Pattle. Greek observers on the ground counted 22 German aircraft downed, but none of the pilots knew who they shot down due to the carnage of the aerial engagement. Dahl described it as "an endless blur of enemy fighters whizzing towards me from every side."

The wing returned back to Elevsis. Later on in the day, the aerodrome was strafed by Bf 109s, but none of them hit any of the Hawker Hurricanes. The Hurricanes were then evacuated on 21 April 1941 to a small, secret airfield near Megara, a small village, where the pilots hid. Approximately 50 miles (80 km) north half of the Luftwaffe were searching for the remaining Hurricanes. By approximately 6 or 7 a.m., about thirty Bf-109s and Stuka dive-bombers flew over the seven pilots who were hiding. The Stukas dived bombed a tanker in the Bay of Athens, and sank it. Dahl and his comrades were only 500 yards (460 m) away from the incident. Surprisingly, none of the bombers nor the fighters were able to spot the Hurricanes parked in the nearby field. Sometime in the afternoon, an Air Commodore arrived in a car to the airfield and asked if one of the seven could volunteer to fly and deliver a package to a man named Carter at Elevsis. Roald Dahl was the only one who volunteered to do it. The contents of the package were of vital importance, and Dahl was told that if he was shot down, or captured, he should burn the package immediately, so it would not fall into enemy hands, and once he had handed over the package, he was to fly to Argos, an airfield, with the rest of the seven pilots in the squadron.

For the rest of April, the situation was horrible for the RAF in Greece. If the Luftwaffe destroyed the remaining seven planes, they would then have complete control of the skies in Greece. They intended to wipe them out. If the squadron were to be found, it would mean the worst. According to Dahl's report, at about 4:30 p.m. a Bf 110 swooped over the airfield at Argos, and found them. The pilots discussed that it would take the 110 roughly half an hour to return to base, and then another half hour for the whole enemy squadron to get ready for take-off, and then another half hour for them to reach Argos. They had roughly an hour and thirty minutes until they would be strafed by enemy aircraft. However, instead of having the remaining seven pilots airborne and intercepting the 110s an hour ahead, the CO ordered them to escort ships evacuating their army in Greece at 6:00. The seven planes got up into the air, but the formation was quickly disorganised as the radios were not working. Dahl and Coke found themselves separated from the rest of the wing. They could not communicate with the rest of the wing, so they continued on flying, looking for the ships to escort. Eventually they ran out of fuel and returned back to Argos, where they found the entire airfield in smoke and flames, with tents flamed, ammunition destroyed, etc.; however there were few casualties. While Roald Dahl and David Coke took off, three other aircraft in the wing somehow managed to get away. The sixth pilot who was taking off was strafed by the enemy and killed. The seventh pilot managed to bail out. Everybody else in the camp was hiding in the slit trenches. Immediately after Dahl and Coke figured out what was going on, the squadron was sent to Crete. A month later they were evacuated to Egypt.

As the Germans were pressing on Athens, Dahl was evacuated to Egypt. His squadron was reassembled in Haifa. From there, Dahl flew missions every day for a period of four weeks, downing a Vichy French Air Force Potez 63 on 8 June and another Ju-88 on 15 June, but he then began to get severe headaches that caused him to black out. He was invalided home to Britain; at this time his rank was Flight Lieutenant.

Dahl began writing in 1942, after he was transferred to Washington, D.C. as Assistant Air Attaché. His first published work, in the 1 August 1942 issue of The Saturday Evening Post was "Shot Down Over Libya", describing the crash of his Gloster Gladiator. C. S. Forester had asked Dahl to write down some RAF anecdotes so that he could shape them into a story. After Forester sat down to read what Dahl had given him, he decided to publish it exactly as it was. The original title of the article was "A Piece of Cake"—the title was changed to sound more dramatic, despite the fact that the he was not "shot down".^[7]

During the war, Forester worked for the British Information Service and was writing propaganda for the Allied cause, mainly for American consumption.^[8] This work introduced Dahl to espionage and the activities of the Canadian spymaster William Stephenson, known by the codename "Intrepid". During the war, Dahl supplied intelligence from Washington to Stephenson and his organisation, which was known as British Security Coordination. Dahl was sent back to Britain, for supposed misconduct by British Embassy officials: "I got booted out by the big boys," he said. Stephenson sent him back to Washington—with a promotion.^[9] After the war, Dahl wrote some of the history of the secret organisation and he and Stephenson remained friends for decades after the war.^[10]

He ended the war as a Wing Commander. His record of five aerial victories, qualifying him as a flying ace, has been confirmed by post-war research and cross-referenced in Axis records, although it is most likely that he scored more than that during 20 April 1941 where 22 German aircraft were downed.^[11]

He was also revealed in the 1980s to have been a clandestine agent for MI-6, the British Foreign Intelligence Service, serving in the United States to help promote Britain's interests and message in the United States and combat the "America First" movement, working with other well known men including Ian Fleming and David Ogilvy.^[12]

Postwar life

Family

Dahl married American actress Patricia Neal on 2 July 1953 at Trinity Church in New York City. Their marriage lasted for 30 years and they had five children: Olivia (who died of measles encephalitis in 1962, aged seven), Tessa, Theo, Ophelia, and Lucy. He dedicated The BFG to Olivia after her death, and subsequently became a proponent of immunisation.^[13]

When he was four months old, Theo Dahl was severely injured when his baby carriage was hit by a taxi in New York City. For a time, he suffered from hydrocephalus, and as a result, his father became involved in the development of what became known as the "Wade-Dahl-Till" (or WDT) valve, a device to alleviate the condition.^[14][15]

In 1965, Neal suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms while pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy; Dahl took control of her rehabilitation and she eventually relearned to talk and walk.^[16] They were divorced in 1983 following a turbulent marriage, and he subsequently married Felicity ("Liccy") d'Abreu Crosland (born 12 December 1938), who was 22 years his junior.

Ophelia Dahl is director and co-founder (with doctor Paul Farmer) of Partners in Health, a non-profit organisation. Lucy Dahl is a screenwriter in Los Angeles. Tessa's daughter Sophie Dahl (who was the inspiration for Sophie, the main character in her grandfather's book The BFG) is a model and author who remembers Roald Dahl as "a very difficult man – very strong, very dominant ... not unlike the father of the Mitford sisters sort of roaring round the house with these very loud opinions, banning certain types – foppish boys, you know – from coming round."^{[citation needed]}

Death and legacy

Roald Dahl died in November 1990 at the age of 74 of a rare blood disease, myelodysplastic anaemia (sometimes called "pre-leukemia"), at his home, Gipsy House in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, and was buried in the cemetery at the parish church of Saints Peter and Paul. According to his granddaughter, the family gave him a "sort of Viking funeral". He was buried with his snooker cues, some very good burgundy, chocolates, HB pencils and a power saw. In his honour, the Roald Dahl Children's Gallery was opened at Buckinghamshire County Museum in nearby Aylesbury.

In 2002, one of Cardiff's modern landmarks, the historic Oval Basin plaza, was re-christened "Roald Dahl Plass". "Plass" means plaza in Norwegian, a nod to the acclaimed late writer's Norwegian roots. There have also been calls from the public for a permanent statue of him to be erected in the city.

Dahl's charitable commitments in the fields of neurology, haematology and literacy have been continued by his widow since his death, through the Roald Dahl Foundation.^[17] 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.

In 2008, the UK charity Booktrust and Children's Laureate Michael Rosen inaugurated The Roald Dahl Funny Prize, an annual award to authors of humorous children's fiction.^[18]

Roald Dahl Day

The anniversary of Dahl's birthday on 13 September has recently become widely celebrated as Roald Dahl Day.^[19][20]

Writing

Dahl's first published work, inspired by a meeting with C. S. Forester, was "Shot Down Over Libya." Today the story is published as "A Piece of Cake". The story, about his wartime adventures, was bought by The Saturday Evening Post for $900, and propelled him into a career as a writer. Its title was inspired by a highly inaccurate and sensationalised article about the crash that blinded him, which claimed he had been shot down instead of simply having to land due to low fuel.

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.

Everybody likes pie

He also had a successful parallel career as the writer of macabre adult short stories, usually with a dark sense of humour and a surprise ending. Many were originally written for American magazines such as Collier's, Ladies Home Journal, Harper's, Playboy and The New Yorker, then subsequently collected by Dahl into anthologies, gaining worldwide acclaim. Dahl wrote more than 60 short stories and they have appeared in numerous collections, some only being published in book form after his death (See List of Roald Dahl short stories). His stories also brought him three Edgar Awards: in 1954, for the collection Someone Like You; in 1959, for the story "The Landlady"; and in 1980, for the episode of Tales of the Unexpected based on "Skin".

One of his more famous adult stories, "The Smoker" (also known as "Man From the South"), was filmed twice as both 1960 and 1985 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and also adapted into Quentin Tarantino's segment of the 1995 film Four Rooms. This bizarre, oft-anthologised suspense classic concerns a man residing in Jamaica who wagers with visitors in an attempt to claim the fingers from their hands; the 1960 Hitchcock version stars Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre.

His short story collection Tales of the Unexpected was adapted to a successful TV series of the same name, beginning with "Man From the South". When the stock of Dahl's own original stories was exhausted, the series continued by adapting stories by authors that were written in Dahl's style, including the American writers John Collier and Stanley Ellin.

He acquired a traditional Romanichal Gypsy wagon in the 1960s and the family used it as a playhouse for his children. He later used the vardo as a writing room, where he wrote the book Danny, the Champion of the World.^[21]

A number of his short stories are supposed to be extracts from the diary of his (fictional) Uncle Oswald, a rich gentleman whose sexual exploits form the subject of these stories. In his novel "My Uncle Oswald" the uncle engages a temptress to seduce 20th Century geniuses and royalty with a love potion secretly added to chocolate truffles made by Dahl's favourite chocolate shop, Prestat of Piccadilly.

Screenplays

For a brief, relatively unsuccessful period in the 1960s, Dahl wrote screenplays. Two of his screenplays – the James Bond film You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – were adaptations of novels by Ian Fleming. Dahl also wrote an initial draft adapting his own novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was heavily rewritten by David Seltzer, and produced as the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). Dahl later disowned the film. Dahl would later receive posthumous songwriting credits for the soundtrack of Tim Burton's 2005 film adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as several songs written by Dahl for the novel were used in the film, set to music composed by Danny Elfman.

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

Dahl ranks amongst the world's bestselling fiction authors, with sales estimated at 100 million.^[22][23]

Children's fiction

Dahl's children's works are usually told from the point of view of a child. They typically involve adult villains or villainesses who hate and mistreat children, and feature at least one "good" adult to counteract the villain(s). These stock characters are possibly a reference to the abuse that Dahl stated that he experienced in the boarding schools he attended. They usually contain a lot of black humour and grotesque scenarios, including gruesome violence. The Witches, George's Marvellous Medicine and Matilda are examples of this formula. The BFG follows it in a more analogous 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. Class-conscious themes – ranging from the thinly veiled to the blatant – also surface in works such as Fantastic Mr. Fox and Danny, the Champion of the World.

Dahl also features in his books characters that are very fat, usually children. Augustus Gloop, Bruce Bogtrotter, and Bruno Jenkins are a few of these characters, although an enormous woman named Aunt Sponge is featured in James and The Giant Peach and the nasty farmer Boggis in Fantastic Mr. Fox features as an enormously fat character. All of these characters (with the possible exception of Bruce Bogtrotter) are either villains or simply unpleasant gluttons. They are usually punished for this: Augustus Gloop drinks from Willy Wonka's chocolate river, disregarding the adults who tell him not to, and falls in, getting sucked up a pipe and nearly being turned into fudge. Bruce Bogtrotter steals cake from the evil headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, and is forced to eat a gigantic chocolate cake in front of the school. Bruno Jenkins is turned into a mouse by witches who lure him to their convention with the promise of chocolate and, it is speculated, possibly disowned or even killed by his parents because of this. Aunt Sponge is flattened by a giant peach.

Dahl's mother used to tell him and his sisters tales about trolls and other mythical Norwegian creatures and some of his children's books contain references or elements inspired by these stories, such as the giants in The BFG, the fox family in Fantastic Mr. Fox and the trolls in The Minpins.

Television

Way Out

In 1961, Dahl hosted and wrote for a science fiction and horror television anthology series called Way Out, which preceded the similar but less dark and edgy Twilight Zone series on the CBS network Saturday nights for 14 episodes^[24] from March to July. Dahl's comedic monologues bookended the episodes, frequently explaining exactly how to murder one's spouse without getting caught. One of the last dramatic network shows done in New York City, the entire series is available for viewing at The Paley Center for Media in New York and Los Angeles.

Tales of the Unexpected

Tales of the Unexpected is a British television series that originally aired between 1979 and 1988, made by Anglia Television for ITV.

The series was an anthology of different tales, initially based on short stories, collected in a book of the same title, by the author Roald Dahl. The stories were sometimes sinister, sometimes wryly comedic, and usually had a twist ending.

List of works

Children's stories

1. The Gremlins (1943)
2. James and the Giant Peach (1961) — Film: James and the Giant Peach (live-action/animated) (1996)
3. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) — Films: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
4. The Magic Finger (1 June 1966)
5. Fantastic Mr Fox (9 December 1970) — Film: Fantastic Mr. Fox (animated) (2009)
6. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (9 January 1972) A sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
7. Danny, the Champion of the World (30 October 1975) — Film: Danny the Champion of the World (TV movie) (1989)
8. The Enormous Crocodile (24 August 1978)
9. The Twits (9 October 1980)
10. George's Marvellous Medicine (21 May 1981)
11. The BFG (14 October 1982) — Film: The BFG (animated) (1989)
12. The Witches (27 October 1983) — Film: The Witches (1990)
13. The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (26 September 1985)
14. Matilda (21 April 1988) — Film: Matilda (1996)
15. Esio Trot (19 April 1990)
16. The Vicar of Nibbleswicke (9 May 1991)
17. The Minpins (8 August 1991)

Children's poetry

1. Revolting Rhymes (10 June 1982)
2. Dirty Beasts (25 October 1984)
3. Rhyme Stew (21 September 1989)

Cookbook

1. Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes by Felicity Dahl, et al. (1994), a collection of recipes based on and inspired by food in Dahl's books, created by Roald & Felicity Dahl, and Josie Fison
2. Roald Dahl's Even More Revolting Recipes by Felicity Dahl, et al. (2001)

Adult fiction

Novels

1. Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen (1948)
2. My Uncle Oswald (1979)

Short story collections

1. Over To You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying (1946)
2. Someone Like You (1953)
3. Lamb to the Slaughter (1953)
4. Kiss Kiss (1960)
5. Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl (1969)
6. Switch Bitch (1974)
7. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (1977)
8. The Best of Roald Dahl (1978)
9. Tales of the Unexpected (1979)
10. More Tales of the Unexpected (1980)
11. Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories (1983). Edited with an introduction by Dahl.
12. The Roald Dahl Omnibus (Dorset Press, 1986)
13. Two Fables (1986). "Princess and the Poacher" and "Princess Mammalia".
14. Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life: The Country Stories of Roald Dahl (1989)
15. The Collected Short Stories of Dahl (1991)
16. The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1997). (Known in the USA as The Umbrella Man and Other Stories).
17. Skin And Other Stories (2000)
18. Roald Dahl: Collected Stories (2006)
19. The Roald Dahl Treasury (2008)

See the alphabetical List of Roald Dahl short stories. See also Roald Dahl: Collected Stories for a complete, chronological listing.

Non-fiction

1. The Mildenhall Treasure (1946, 1977, 1999)
2. Boy – Tales of Childhood (1984) Recollections up to the age of 20, looking particularly at schooling in Britain in the early part of the 20th century.
3. Going Solo (1986) Continuation of his autobiography, in which he goes to work for Shell and spends some time working in Tanzania before joining the war effort and becoming one of the last Allied pilots to withdraw from Greece during the German invasion.
4. Measles, a Dangerous Illness (1986)^[25]
5. Memories with Food at Gipsy House (1991)
6. Roald Dahl's Guide to Railway Safety (1991)
7. My Year (1993)

Plays

1. The Honeys (1955) Produced at the Longacre Theater on Broadway.

Film scripts

1. The Gremlins (1943)
2. 36 Hours (1965)
3. You Only Live Twice (1967)
4. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)
5. The Night Digger (1971)
6. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)

Television

1. Way Out (1961) Horror series hosted by Roald Dahl and produced by David Susskind
2. Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "Lamb to the Slaughter" (1958)
3. Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "Dip in the Pool" (1958)
4. Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "Poison" (1958)
5. Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "Man from the South" (1960) with Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre
6. Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat" (1960)
7. Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "The Landlady" (1961)
8. Tales of the Unexpected (1979-88), episodes written and introduced by Roald Dahl.

Controversies

In 1983 Dahl reviewed Tony Clifton's God Cried, a picture book about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon depicting Israelis killing thousands of Beirut inhabitants by bombing civilian targets. Dahl's review stated that this invasion was when "we all started hating Israel", and that the book would make readers "violently anti-Israeli", but subsequently insisted, "I am not anti-Semitic. I am anti-Israel."^[26] Dahl told a reporter in 1983, "There’s a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity ... I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason."^[26] Nonetheless Dahl maintained friendships with a number of Jews, including philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who said, "I thought he might say anything. Could have been pro-Arab or pro-Jew. There was no consistent line. He was a man who followed whims, which meant he would blow up in one direction, so to speak."^[26] In later years, Dahl included a sympathetic episode about German-Jewish refugees in his book Going Solo, and claimed to be opposed to injustice, not Jews.^[26]

References and Notes

Wiki Source

Sources Philip Howard, "Dahl, Roald (1916–1990)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39827 accessed 24 May 2006 References ^ http://inogolo.com/pronunciation/d1324/Roald_Dahl ^ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/books/review/Heilbrunn-t.html?_r=1 ^ Jeremy Treglown, Roald Dahl: A Biography (1994) , Faber and Faber, page 21. ^ a b Dahl, Roald (1984). Boy: Tales of Childhood. Jonathan Cape.  ^ Roald Dahl - Penguin UK Authors - Penguin UK ^ Roald Dahl (derivative work) and Quentin Blake (2005). Roald Dahl’s Incredible Chocolate Box. ISBN 0-141-31959-3.  ^ a b Dahl, Roald (1986). Going Solo. Jonathan Cape.  ^ Cambridge Guide to Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1989) ISBN 0-521-26751-X. ^ Bill Macdonald - The True Intrepid p249 (Raincoast 2001)ISBN 1-55192-418-8 Dahl also speaks about his espionage work in the documentary The True Intrepid ^ Macdonald - The True Intrepid p243 ISBN 1-55192-418-8. ^ Christopher Shores and Clive Williams – Aces High: A Tribute to the Most Notable Fighter Pilots of the British and Commonwealth Air Forces in WWII (Grub Street Publishing, 1994) ISBN 1-898697-00-0. ^ The book "The Irregulars" (by Jennet Conant, Simon and Schuster 2008) describes this era of Dahl's life and those with whom he worked. ^ http://www.childalert.co.uk/absolutenm/templates/newstemplate.asp?articleid=291&zoneid=2 ^ "Water on the Brain". MedGadget: Internet Journal of Emerging Medical Technologies. 2005-07-15. http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2005/07/water_on_the_br.html. Retrieved 2006-05-11.