Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl was a British writer known for his ingenious and irreverent children’s books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and Matilda (1988), both of which were adapted into popular films. He specialized in stories of plucky children who outwit cruel and hypocritical adults, told with a heavy dose of fantasy and wicked humor.

By the early 21st century Dahl’s books had sold more than 300 million copies. However, some readers, both during his lifetime and after his death, deemed the language and characterizations in his children’s novels to be offensive. Many of his books were posthumously altered to remove this material, which ignited debates about censorship. Dahl’s personal views, particularly about Jewish people, only fueled the controversy surrounding his work and further complicated his legacy.

Early life and a stint as a chocolate bar tester

Dahl was born on September 13, 1916, in Llandaff, Wales, to Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg. His parents were prosperous Norwegian immigrants; Harald co-owned a ship-brokering company. One of five children, Roald was named for the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. His family nickname was “the Apple,” because he was considered “the apple of his mother’s eye.” She often took her children to Norway for family holidays, where they heard local folk tales of witches, trolls, and hags.

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Britannica Quiz

Classic Children’s Books Quiz

When Dahl was three, his older sister Astri and his father died within months of each other. These losses profoundly affected him; notably, orphanhood would be a common theme in many of his books. Dahl’s boarding school education also influenced his writing. He later described his and his friends’ school days as filled with corporal punishment and bullying by other boys, although some of his recollections have been disputed. In any case, many of his literary villains took the form of teachers and headmasters. A more pleasant experience occurred during his time at Repton, a renowned public school in Derbyshire that was close to a newly opened Cadbury chocolate facility. Dahl and his classmates were recruited to test and rate a sampling of chocolate bars.

Wartime experience and writing for Disney

Following his graduation from Repton in 1934, Dahl avoided a university education and joined an expedition to Newfoundland. He worked for the Shell Oil Company from 1937 to 1939 in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika (now in Tanzania), but he enlisted in the Royal Air Force (RAF) when World War II broke out. Flying as a fighter pilot, he was seriously injured in a crash landing in Libya. He served with his squadron in Greece and then in Syria before doing a stint (1942–43) as assistant air attaché in Washington, D.C. (during which time he also served as a spy for the British government). There the novelist C.S. Forester encouraged him to write about his most exciting RAF adventures, which were published by the Saturday Evening Post.

Dahl’s service in the RAF inspired his first book, The Gremlins (1943), which developed from a short story into a film project for Walt Disney. Set during the Battle of Britain, it begins with a fighter pilot who looks out the window of his plane and sees a gremlin sabotaging the aircraft. Although the book was published and sold well, especially in the United States and Australia, the film version never materialized. Dahl’s wartime experience also influenced his first story collection, Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying (1946), a series of military tales that was warmly received by critics and showed Dahl’s flair for the fantastic. He achieved best-seller status with Someone Like You (1953; rev. ed. 1961), a collection of macabre stories for adults, which was followed by Kiss, Kiss (1959), which focused on stormy romantic relationships.

Fatherhood and family tragedies

In 1953 Dahl married actress Patricia Neal, with whom he had five children. Their family suffered tragedy several times. In 1960 their four-month-old son Theo was hit by a taxi and subsequently developed hydrocephalus (an accumulation of fluid in the brain). Determined to help him, Dahl worked with neurosurgeon Kenneth Till and Stanley Wade, a toymaker friend, to invent the Wade-Dahl-Till valve, a shunt to improve hydrocephalus care. In 1962 Dahl and Neal’s seven-year-old daughter Olivia died of measles. Afterward he renounced his faith in Christianity, having become angered when his former Repton headmaster, who had recently served as archbishop of Canterbury, told him that Olivia was not spending the afterlife playing with the family’s beloved pet dog (as Dahl envisioned) because animals are not included in heaven.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

Three years later Neal had a series of strokes that left her unable to walk and impaired her speech. She eventually recovered with her husband’s help, although some accounts have likened his nursing of her to bullying. The couple divorced in 1983, and Dahl subsequently married Felicity Crosland, a set designer whom he met (and soon began an affair with) while Neal was filming a commercial.

Children’s books

The joys and sorrows of family life fueled Dahl’s writing. When his children were young, he turned primarily to writing the books that would give him lasting fame. Unlike most other books aimed at a young audience, Dahl’s works had a darkly comic nature, frequently including gruesome violence and death. His villains were often malevolent adults who imperiled precocious and noble child protagonists. His works presented the world through the eyes and imagination of a child, treating such themes as fairness, evil, magic, and revenge in humorous but unvarnished terms that exposed adult hypocrisies.

Dahl’s children’s books met with huge success. James and the Giant Peach (1961; film 1996), written for his own children, originated as a bedtime story. The book follows the adventures of a young orphan who escapes his nasty aunts by going on a journey around the world inside an enormous rolling peach. It was followed in 1964 by the equally popular Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was made into the films Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971; starring Gene Wilder as the titular eccentric chocolatier) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005; with Johnny Depp in the Wonka role). Proving the story’s enduring appeal, it was adapted for the big screen again in 2023, as Wonka (starring Timothée Chalamet).

His other works for young readers include Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970; film 2009), Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972), The Enormous Crocodile (1978), The BFG (1982; films 1989 and 2016), and The Witches (1983; films 1990 and 2020). One of his last such books, Matilda, was adapted for film in 1996 and 2022 and for the stage in 2010. Its title character is a precocious but neglected young girl with telekinetic powers who uses them to confront the bullying headmistress at her school.

Many of Dahl’s books have been illustrated by the award-winning illustrator Quentin Blake, whose whimsical style is well-suited to Dahl’s subversive humor. Likewise, many of the directors who adapted Dahl’s works for the screen—including Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Nicolas Roeg, Wes Anderson, and Danny DeVito—largely retained his sense of the marvelous and grotesque.

Dahl also published several collections of poetry for children. Revolting Rhymes (1982) and Rhyme Stew (1989) contain poems that satirize classic fairy tales as well as such wickedly funny pieces as “The Dentist and the Crocodile,” which imagines the fearful reaction of a dentist as he examines a massive-jawed crocodile for tooth decay. Animals were also the subject of his poems in Dirty Beasts (1983), including a lion whose favorite tender meat is “neither steak nor chops. IT’S YOU.”

Other works and death

While Dahl focused primarily on children’s literature late in his career, he continued to produce short stories for adult audiences, which were published in collections such as Switch Bitch (1974), The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (1977), and Tales of the Unexpected (1979). His stories were the basis for the mystery television series Tales of the Unexpected (1979–88). Dahl also wrote several scripts for movies, among them the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968; with Ken Hughes and Richard Maibaum). His autobiography, Boy: Tales of Childhood, was published in 1984.

Dahl died in 1990 at age 74 from complications of a type of myelodysplastic syndrome. The following year his widow established the Roald Dahl Marvellous Children’s Charity.

Controversies and legacy

While Dahl’s lasting reputation remains that of a beloved children’s author to many readers, he has also been a controversial figure. Some of his works, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, were criticized at the time of their publication for their use of racial and sexual stereotypes. But his most notable transgressions came outside his fiction. In several interviews and nonfiction writings during the 1980s and before his death in 1990, Dahl expressed opinions that were widely viewed as antisemitic. While he defended himself as being “anti-Israel” rather than antisemitic, that distinction was not accepted by a number of readers, and his estate published an apology for his statements in 2020.

Three years later, Dahl’s publishers announced that they had revised hundreds of passages in his classic children’s books containing language that is considered insensitive and outdated concerning gender, race, mental health, and body type. Although the revisions were approved by Dahl’s estate, the move was met with both support for reflecting a changing culture and criticism for perceived editorial overreach. Among those who objected to the changes were fellow authors Salman Rushdie and Philip Pullman, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and the writers’ organization PEN America. Rushdie called it “absurd censorship,” and Pullman told the BBC, “If Dahl offends us, let him go out of print.” However, the original versions not only remained in wide circulation but also continued to be published in new editions.