Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl was an author of many children’s books, as well as short stories for adults. He was born in Llandaff, Wales in 1916 to Norwegian parents who had come to England in the early 1900s. Dahl’s father died when Dahl was four, and his mother carried out her husband’s wish that the children be educated in English schools rather than returning to Norway. Thus, Dahl’s education proceeded in a series of boarding schools; his experiences are chronicled in Boy (1984). These years were marked by unremarkable academic performance, corporal punishment, and homesickness. One of the happy memories involved chocolate: the Cadbury chocolate company periodically sent boxes of new chocolates to Dahl’s school for students to test and evaluate. Dahl took this job very seriously – it certainly influenced the plot of works such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964). After boarding school, Dahl joined Shell Petroleum and was sent to present-day Tanzania. He joined the Royal Airforce in 1939, serving as a pilot in the Mediterranean theatre. After a plane crash, which resulted in severe head injuries, Dahl was transferred to Washington D.C. in 1942, where he served as an assistant attaché. It was in the United States that he began to write stories for magazines, many of which have been collected in anthologies. He published a series of children’s books throughout the 1960s and 70s, most of which openly acknowledge the dark side of childhood with its fears and anxieties. Dahl’s career as a writer was not devoid of controversy: his detractors have accused him of racism and anti-semitism in his writing, and decried the unmitigated cruelty of many adults in his stories. Roald Dahl died in 1990 in Buckinghamshire, UK. The Roald Dahl Foundation funds research in a variety of medical fields, as well as literacy.