Roald Dahl (1916-1990) was born in Llandaff, South Wales, and went to Repton School in England. His parents were Norwegian, so holidays were spent in Norway. As he explains in Boy, he turned down the idea of university in favor of a job that would take him to 'a wonderful faraway place'. In 1933 he joined the Shell Company, which sent him to Mombasa in East Africa. When World War II began in 1939 he became a fighter pilot and in 1942 was made assistant air attache in Washington, where he started to write short stories. His first major success as a writer for children was in 1964. Thereafter his children's books brought him increasing popularity, and when he died children mourned the world over, particularly in Britain where he had lived for many years.
"With the inventive power of a Thomas Edison and the imagination of
a Lewis Carroll . . . Roald Dahl is a wizard of comedy and the
grotesque, an artist with a marvelously topsy-turvy sense of the
ridiculous in life."
--CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
"Dahl has the mastery of plot and characters possessed by great
writers of the past, along with a wildness and wryness of his own.
One of his trademarks is writing beautifully about the ugly, even
the horrible."
--LOS ANGELES TIMES "A collection of Roald Dahl stories is always
occasion for applause."
--CHICAGO DAILY NEWS "An ingenious imagination, a fascination with
odd and ordinary detail . . . are the first strengths of Dahl's
storytelling."
--NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "[Dahl's] stare is unblinking, and
most of his tales are irritants, provocations. Fantastic as Grimm,
neat as O. Henry, heartless as Saki, they stick in the mind long
after subtler ones have faded: incredible (literally),
unforgettable, and vengefully funny."
--from the Introduction by Jeremy Treglown
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