Roald Dahl

ROALD DAHL

Date of Birth: September 13, 1916
Date of Death: November 23, 1990
Birthplace: Llandaff, South Wales
Current Residence: Dahl lived with his first wife (later divorced), actress Patricia Neal, and their children at Gipsy House, Missenden, Buckinghamshire, England.
Education: British public schools. Dahl was an unextraordinary student; one teacher's report called him "a persistent muddler. Vocabulary negligible, sentences mal-constructed. He reminds me of a camel."
Profession: Worked for Shell Oil in London, 1933-37, and was sent to Tanzania to work; Royal Air Force fighter pilot, promoted to wing commander, 1939-45.
Influences, Interests and Interesting Tidbits: Dahl wrote the teleplay for "Lamb to the Slaughter," a memorable "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" episode, as well as the screenplay, with Ken Hughs, of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," the screen adaptation of his book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and various other screenplays.According to Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Vol. 37 ; Dahl got his start as a writer when C.S. Forester interviewed him over lunch for an article for the Saturday Evening Post. Forester was too busy eating to take notes, and the notes that Dahl took turned out to be a story which Forester sent to a magazine under Dahl's name.

They love being spooked...They love chocolates and toys and money...They love being made to giggle.
-Roald Dahl

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.
-Roald Dahl, Boy, Tales of Childhood

[Dahl] knows how to steer an unwavering course along the hairline where the gruesome and the comic meet and mingle. He thinks of a story as a staircase up which the reader is to be lured and finally coaxed into taking that confident last step which, breathtakingly and deliciously, isn't there., Times Literary Supplement