Roald Dahl
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Roald Dahl (13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a Welsh novelist, short story author and screenwriter of Norwegian parentage, famous as a writer for both children and adults.
His most popular books include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The Witches and The BFG.
Roald Dahl was born at 32 Fairwater Road, Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales in 1916, to Norwegian parents, Harald Dahl (from Sarpsborg, Østfold) and Sofie Magdalene Dahl née Hesselberg. Dahl's family moved from Norway and settled in Cardiff in the 1880s. 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.
He was very tall, reaching 6'6" (1.98m) in adult life, and he was good at sports, being made captain of the school Fives and Squash team, and also playing for the football team. This helped his popularity. He developed an interest in photography. 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 third book for children, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Throughout his childhood and adolescent years, he spent his summer holidays in his parents' native Norway, mostly enjoying the Fjords. His childhood is the subject of his autobiographical work, Boy: Tales of Childhood.
Dahl began writing in 1942, after he was transferred to Washington as Assistant Air Attaché. His first published work, in the August 1, 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".
During the war, Forester worked for the British Information Service and was writing propaganda for the Allied cause, mainly for American consumption. 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 organization, 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. After the war Dahl wrote some of the history of the secret organization and he and Stephenson remained friends for decades after the war.
He ended the war as a Wing Commander. His record of five aerial victories has been confirmed by post-war research and cross-referenced in Axis records.
He married Academy Award winning American actress Patricia Neal on 2 July 1953, at Trinity Church in New York City. They were married for 30 years and had five children: Olivia (died of measles encephalitis, aged seven), Tessa, Theo, Ophelia, and Lucy.
Ophelia Dahl is director and co-founder (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. Lucy Dahl, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles. Tessa's daughter (who was the inspiration for Sophie, the main character in her grandfather's book The BFG) is model and author Sophie Dahl who remembers him 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."
In the summer of 1983, he wrote a book review for the Literary Review of God Cried by Newsweek writer Tony Clifton, a picture book about the invasion of Lebanon by Israel. Dahl's review stated that the Israeli attack on Lebanon in June 1982 was when "we all started hating Israel," and that the book would make readers "violently anti-Israeli". According to biographer Jeremy Treglown, Dahl had originally written "when we all started hating Jews" - but editor Gillian Greenwood of the Literary Review changed Dahl's terms from "Jews" and "Jewish" to "Israel" and "Israeli".
On the basis of the published version, Dahl would later claim, "I am not anti-Semitic. I am anti-Israel." Dahl believed that his review kept him from being knighted, which was reportedly an ambition of his. Perhaps due to his hopes for a knighthood, in 1986 Dahl had turned down the award of an OBE, according to government papers which were leaked in 2003.
According to at least two biographers, when defending his review he told a journalist that same year: "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." Nonetheless, according to Treglown, Dahl maintained friendships with a handful of individual Jews.
In later years, Dahl occasionally tried to downplay some of the accusations of anti-Semitism. He included a sympathetic episode about German-Jewish refugees in his book Going Solo, and on another occasion he claimed that he was opposed to injustice, not Jews. He never retreated from his strong stance against Israel, however, and shortly before his death in 1990 he had told, according to Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, the British newspaper The Independent in an interview that "I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become anti-Semitic."
Roald Dahl died of a rare blood disease, myelodysplastic anaemia, on 23 November 1990, at his home, Gipsy House, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, at the age of 74, and was buried in the cemetery at the parish church of St Peter and St 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.
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. 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.
Inspired by a meeting with C. S. Forester, Dahl's first published work was Shot Down Over Libya (today the story is published as "A Piece of Cake"), a story about his wartime adventures, which 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 erroneous and sensationalized article about the crash that blinded him, which claimed he had been shot down instead of simply forced to land by 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.
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 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. See List of Roald Dahl short stories. His stories also brought him three Edgar Awards: in 1954, for the collection Someone Like You; 1959, for the story The Landlady; and 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 as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and also adapted into Quentin Tarantino's segment of the 1995 film Four Rooms. This bizarre, oft-anthologized, suspense classic concerns a man residing in Jamiaca who wagers with visitors in an attempt to claim the fingers from their hands.
His short story collection Tales of the Unexpected was adapted to a successful TV series of the same name. 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.
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.
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.
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's works for children are geared for late elementary school students and 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) (perhaps a reference to the abuse that Dahl himself experienced in the boarding schools he attended). They usually contain a lot of black humour 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. 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. All of these characters (with the possible exception of Bruce Bogtrotter) are either villains or simply unpleasant gluttons. All of them are usually punished for this; Augustus Gloop drank from Willy Wonka's chocolate river, despite the adults telling him not to, and fell in, getting sucked up a pipe and being nearly 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. 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. Many of his children's books are illustrated by Quentin Blake.
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl
