Roald Dahl was born in South Wales in 1916 to Norwegian parents, and his early life was overshadowed by sad events: his sister and his father died within a few weeks of each other when he was very young. He was educated at a boarding school for boys, but he did not fit in easily with the life of the school and had a very unhappy time. As a result of his experiences there, some of the stories he wrote later feature characters who are cruel to those who have been cruel to them.
After leaving school, Dahl went to work for the Shell Oil Company in London and in Africa, and when the Second World War started he joined the Royal Air Force. He served as a fighter pilot in North Africa, where he was badly injured in a plane crash, and then in Greece and Syria. In 1942 he accepted a post as a British military official in Washington, and it was here that he began to have some success as a writer. He succeeded in selling a number of stories based on his wartime flying adventures to a newspaper called the Saturday Evening Post, and after the war ended he became increasingly known as a writer.
In 1953 Dahl married the American actress Patricia Neal, with whom he had one son and four daughters. Many of his best books for young people grew out of stories that he invented for his children at bedtime. But Dahl's life was still clouded by family misfortune: one of his daughters died when she was seven years old, and his wife was very ill while the children were young. In 1983 his marriage to Patricia ended, and he married Felicity Ann Crosland. Dahl died in 1990 at the age of seventy-four.
Over to You (1946) was Dahl's first collection of stories, based on his years as a pilot. Other collections for adults which achieved wide popularity include Someone Like You (1953), Kiss, Kiss (1960) and Switch Bitch (1974). A number of these stories were rewritten for television as Tales of the Unexpected. It is the development of the action rather than that of the characters that is central to
Dahl's writing, and his stories are characterized by the presence of an unusual twist at the end. He admitted that he found it increasingly hard to find new ideas for his adult fiction, and this was when he began to write for children. He had great success with his young readers, who love Dahl's dark humour and the sense that his characters can make anything happen if they want it enough. Many adults, among them parents, teachers and librarians, have voiced objections to what they consider to be bad manners and violence in Dahl's books, but children do not seem to share these worries.
Dahl wrote nineteen children's books in all. The first was James and the Giant Peach (1961), in which a boy crosses the Atlantic Ocean inside a large piece of fruit, together with some very big insects. While on a tour of a magical and mysterious chocolate factory in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Charlie sees four unpleasant children disappear. This book became a bestseller as soon as it appeared and was made into a very successful film in 1971. Many of the children's stories present ugly and unpleasant characters to whom unpleasant things happen. George's Marvellous Medicine (1981) is about a boy who has a mean, unkind grandmother; in return for her unkindness, he gives her a medicine which does strange and terrible things to her. Children love Revolting Rhymes (1982), in which traditional stories are retold as poems in amusing ways.
Dahl also wrote for the cinema, including the screenplay for You Only Live Twice (1967) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). Parts of his own life story are told in Boy (1984), about his early life and schooldays, and Going Solo (1986), in which he describes his flying days. Dahl has won many prizes for his writing over the years, and his work continues to be popular with children and adults all over the world.
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