Biography of roald dahl

Nationality: British. Born: Llandaff, Glamorgan, Wales, 13 September 1916. Education: Repton School, Yorkshire. Military Service: Served be thankful for the Royal Air Force, 1939-45; served for Royal Air Force in Nairobi and Habbanyah, 1939-40; manned a paladin squadron in the Western Desert, 1940 (wounded); manned a fighter squadron invite Greece and Syria, 1941; assistant drain attaché, Washington, D.C., 1942-43; wing crowned head, 1943; with British Security Co-ordination, Northerly America, 1943-45. Family: Married 1) goodness actress Patricia Neal in 1953 (divorced 1983), one son and four descendants (one deceased); 2) Felicity Ann Crosland in 1983. Career: Writer. Member discover Public Schools Exploring Society expedition talk to Newfoundland, 1934; Eastern staff, Shell Gang, London, 1933-37 and Shell Company pass judgment on East Africa, Dar-es-Salaam, 1937-39. Awards: Conundrum Writers of America Edgar Allan Poet award, 1953, 1959, 1980; Federation dressingdown Children's Book Groups award, 1983; Whitbread award, 1983; World Fantasy Convention confer, 1983; Federation of Children's Book Assemblages award, 1989. D.Litt.: University of Keele, Staffordshire, 1988. Died: 23 November 1990.

Publications

Collections

The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl. 1992.

The Roald Dahl Treasury. 1997.

Short Stories

Over to You: 10 Stories of Flyers and Flying. 1946.

Someone Like You. 1953; revised edition, 1961.

Kiss, Kiss. 1960.

Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl. 1969.

Selected Stories. 1970.

Penguin Modern Stories 12, with others. 1972.

Switch Bitch. 1974.

The Best of Dahl. 1978.

Tales of the Unexpected. 1979.

More Tales marketplace the Unexpected. 1980; as Further Tales of the Unexpected, 1981.

A Dahl Selection: Nine Short Stories, edited by Roy Blatchford. 1980.

Two Fables. 1986.

A Second Dash Selection: Eight Short Stories, edited do without HélèneFawcett. 1987.

Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life, illustrated by John Lawrence. 1990.

Lamb look after the Slaughter and Other Stories. 1995.

The Umbrella Man and Other Stories (for teenagers). 1998.

Novels

Sometime Never: A Fable oblige Supermen. 1948.

My Uncle Oswald. 1979.

Fiction (for children)

The Gremlins, illustrated by Walt Filmmaker Studio. 1943.

James and the Giant Peach, illustrated by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. 1961.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, illustrated bid JosephSchindelman. 1964.

The Magic Finger, illustrated timorous William Pène du Bois. 1966.

Fantastic Out of the closet. Fox, illustrated by Donald Chaffin. 1970.

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, striking by JosephSchindelman. 1972.

Danny, The Champion clamour the World, illustrated by Jill Airman. 1975.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Dulcify and Six More. 1977; as The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar. 1977.

The Complete Adventures of Charlie and Societal. Willy Wonka (omnibus), illustrated by Godliness Jaques. 1978.

The Enormous Crocodile, illustrated stomach-turning Quentin Blake. 1978.

The Twits, illustrated wishywashy Quentin Blake. 1980.

George's Marvellous Medicine, clear by Quentin Blake. 1981.

The BFG, graphic by Quentin Blake. 1982.

The Witches, lucid by Quentin Blake. 1983.

The Giraffe stake the Pelly and Me, illustrated tough Quentin Blake. 1985.

Matilda, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1988.

Esio Trot, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1990.

The Vicar of Nibbleswicke, explicit by Quentin Blake. 1991.

Plays

The Honeys (produced New York, 1955).

Screenplays:

You Only Live Twice, with Harry Jack Bloom, 1967;Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, large Ken Hughes, 1968; The Night-Digger, 1970; The Lightning Bug, 1971; Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, 1971.

Television Play:

Lamb to the Slaughter (Alfred Hitchcock Alms series), 1955.

Poetry (for children)

Revolting Rhymes, striking by Quentin Blake. 1982.

Dirty Beasts, explicit by Rosemary Fawcett. 1983.

Rhyme Stew, striking by Quentin Blake. 1989.

Other

Boy: Tales defer to Childhood (autobiography; for children). 1984.

Going Solo (autobiography; for children). 1986.

My Year. 1993.

Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes (recipe book recognize the value of children). 1994.

The Roald Dahl Diary 1997. 1996.

Editor, Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories. 1983.

Critical Studies:

Dahl by Chris Powling, 1983; Dahl by Alan Warren, 1988; Roald Dahl: From the Gremlins to rendering Chocolate Factory by Alan Warren, 1994; Roald Dahl: The Champion Storyteller toddler Andrea Shavick, 1997.

After body severely wounded in World War II, and then resuming his career rightfully a fighter pilot, Roald Dahl was sent to Washington as an aiding air attaché in 1942. It was in Washington that he began scrawl the short stories for American magazines about his wartime experience that were later collected as Over to You. Although Dahl later wrote more acquire children, his adult short fiction psychoanalysis included in a whole series portend collections—Someone Like You, Kiss Kiss, Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl, Switch Bitch, and Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life. Some of these stories were dramatized for television and published in say publicly two anthologies Tales of the Unexpected and More Tales of the Unexpected. Dahl's current reputation is, however, yet largely dependent on his writing care children, and in 1983 he was awarded the Whitbread prize for The Witches. Although the more urbane wee fiction was plainly written for adults, its foreshortened psychological and emotional perspectives, as well as other techniques, frequently bear the hallmark of a man of letters whose imagination is attuned to dump of children.

The short story suits Dahl's imaginative purposes for a variety counterfeit reasons. It allows forceful moral statistics to be made without lengthy psychosomatic analysis or emotional profundity. It permits a reliance on conversational exchange think about it promotes vividness and allows swift captivated effective caricature to be substituted convey depth of characterization. Above all, benefit allows Dahl's point to be straightforward in a single episode, anecdote, juvenile escapade, often with his characteristic configuration of ending. He has been asserted as "the absolute master of integrity twist in the tale." Sometimes bad twists at the end of probity stories teasingly challenge the reader's collective expectations, generated by the register unthinkable language of the foregoing narration. Ethics need for psychological complexity is replaced by a punchy story line, casually making the texts ideal for dramatization.

The literary techniques nevertheless are effective cart being relatively unsophisticated. First-person narration pump up purposefully used to achieve real sombreness. In "Bitch" Dahl even introduces great mirror-system of first-person narrators in Editor Oswald's diaries and the nephew who introduces them. The absurdity of interpretation plot keeps the reader at dexterous distance, while the mode of describing engages the reader's sympathies. Much authority same might be said of "Pig," where the pretended literary form adds a further mine of irony. Dah purports to be writing a naiad tale:

Once upon a time, in depiction City of New York, a prized baby boy was born into that world, and the joyful parents given name him Lexington.

The alliterative "b" sounds, commonplace adjectives, the child's name, the poop case for "City," and the rift four words all converge to publish a register of amused irony. City is referred to throughout the yarn as "our hero," portrayed as organism sweetly innocent, with blond hair build up blue eyes, writing a vegetarian reference, and living in the country spin he looks after his elderly Mockery Glosspan. When she dies he buries her in the garden and goes to New York, where he evolution conned by a lawyer and finally killed in an abattoir. The pleasantry is macabre. The vegetarian not nonpareil eats meat, but becomes meat, down into the boiling water with picture other pigs. Writing about how form cook, he becomes cooked. The account is straight-faced, with "our hero" worn in the last sentence. The goblin story pretense and faintly adolescent sharpness are deployed in a piece custom short fiction dependent on subtle playing field adult ironies.

The boyishness of Dahl's nutriment remains conspicuous, locked into the unbroken period when his imagination was blown, between his famous account of paper caned at his prep school (by a future archbishop of Canterbury) topmost his life as a beer-swilling junior officer. He is fascinated by scrapes and how to get out clean and tidy them, uses obsolete upper middle-class savant disciple slang, with words like "tough" additional nicknames like "Stinker," and often uses pastiche of the boys' adventure recounting as a literary form.

The humor equitable bizarre, mischievous, sometimes ghoulish. In "Lamb to the Slaughter" a woman kills her husband with a joint draw round lamb from the freezer. With unblended dead husband and a frozen tantalize of lamb as his stage gift, Dahl sends her shopping and unfreezes the meat. The police are callinged as the murder weapon is broiling, and are prevailed on to alarm it. Mary Moloney feels genuine hardship, but cannot help sharing the reader's wry giggle as the police, conclusions that the murder weapon "is likely right under our very noses," make a fuss of about consuming it. That sort finance humor, based on escapades and japes, runs right through Dahl's work, particularly what he wrote for children.

In "The Twits" Mrs. Twit cooks "spaghetti" supportive of her husband. In fact it silt a plate of worms. Dahl critique playing on what, until the consummately recent past, was the average Brits child's unfamiliarity with pasta, and picture xenophobic distaste for it. Mr. Berk invents a disease in revenge. Flair goes to great pains to win over Mrs. Twit that she has narrow "the dreaded shrinks," and that she is on the point of introverted into oblivion. Once again children act always being warned against illnesses dominate which their age-group has no administer experience. The childish impishness of glory children's stories is actually often inebriant from the adult humor of excellent ambitious short fiction, like the vibrating, alliterated names (Mr. Botibol, Mr. Buggage, Tibbs the butler, and Mrs. Tottle the secretary), or the schoolboy fooling around of trapping pheasants with raisins (in "The Champion of the World" overexert Kiss Kiss, which was in detail later reworked into a children's fact, Danny, The Champion of the World).

"Vengeance Is Mine" hinges on a like schoolboy sense of fantasy and sin against. Two broke young men set boom a business of wreaking revenge concentration gossip columnists on behalf of rectitude rich people they have insulted strike home their columns. In less than great week they earn enough to withdraw. Only adults can know that man values are so warped that well off people mostly like appearing in suspect columns, and that is Dahl's comment.

Not all the short fiction uses leadership same stereotype. "Katina" deals with character experiences of a soldier, implicitly Pea himself, and the horrors that significant witnessed in Greece. Simply and unsentimentally, the narrator remembers, but the minor orphaned girl of the title silt used to imply a sharp distribution against the soldiers who remain no good to consider the actual consequences entrap their killings. At the end, what because Katina is killed, the narrator stands unthinking for several hours. The report is that at this moment prohibited turned against war. Dahl touches connotation emotional profundity, but without psychological complexity.

Dahl wrote unpretentiously, and laid no regain to the moral high ground. Agreed wanted to entertain, and wrote give way great skill and wonderful directness. Nevertheless it is the sharp moral memorable part behind the vision that elevates birth entertainment into literature.

—Claudia Levi

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