Roald Dahl (
September 13,
1916 -
November 23,
1990) was a
novelist and short story author.
Born to Norwegian parents who settled in Wales, Dahl came to write children's stories such as Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach; he also wrote macabre adult fiction, usually with a dark sense of humor and a surprise ending. One of his more famous adult stories was filmed as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: a young smoker is challenged to a bet: he will go to a private room and have his left hand tied down, and if he can light his lighter successfully a certain number of times in a row, he will win a car. If he can't, he will have a finger chopped off.
Many of his childrens books have illustrations by Quentin Blake.
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
- Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (a sequel to the above)
- James and the Giant Peach[?]
- Fantastic Mr Fox
- The Witches (made into a film starring Angelica Huston[?])
- Matilda
- The Magic Finger
- The Wonderful story of Henry Sugar
- Danny the champion of the world
- The BFG
- Boy (An autobiography until his college days, looking particularly at schooling in Britain in the early part of the 20th century)
- Going Solo (Continuation of his autobiography, where he goes to work for Shell and spends some time working in South Africa before joining the War effort and becoming one of the last Allied pilots to withdraw from Greece during the German invasion)
- A Piece of Cake
- The Smoker (described above)
- Pig (a boy raised as a vegetarian ends up slaughtered by a pork-pulling machine)
- The Constable's Coat or Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat (a woman having an affair hides an expensive mink goat given to her by the adulterer only to have her husband discover it and give it to his secretary, who he is having sex with)
- The Landlady (a man ignores warnings about staying at an inn only to be taxidermied by the inn-keeper)
- Parson's Pleasure
- A Dip In The Pool
- Royal Jelly
- Smell
- Lamb to the Slaughter
Many 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.
Roald Dahl is the grandfather of the model Sophie Dahl.