The Complete Short Stories: Volume One

Product Information

Danny DeVito directed this movie adaptation and also voiced the narrator. 'The Fantastic Mr. Fox' (2009) Dahl died on November 23, 1990, at the age of 74. After suffering an unspecified infection, on November 12, 1990, Dahl had been admitted to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England. I first encountered the work of Roald Dahl in third grade, by playing a character in a classroom adaptation of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Not long after that, I read “James and the Giant Peach.” I was not a child who particularly cared for children’s literature, but even as an eight- or nine-year-old I was captivated by the way Dahl’s fantasias took on their own logic, their own momentum, and were driven as much by the flow of language as by the absurdities of plot. Put another way, reading Dahl was my introduction to the importance of the teller, the idea that a successful story was less a matter of narrative than of voice—or not less, exactly, for Dahl’s writing is nothing if not plotted. But he made me aware that the narrator, whether third person or first, is not a neutral figure but an active, even directive, force. (This discovery may have had something to do with the role I played in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”: I was the narrator.) Mersa Matruh, Cairo, Spitfires over the Channel and the heroic exploits of RAF fighters in the first Greek campaign, all feature in these vivid stories. Everyone of them is concerned with the war in the air and its psychological effect on the men who fought it. The author recaptures the spirit of “those early days when we were fighting in Libya; one flew very hard in those days because there were not many pilots; they certainly could not send any out from England, because they were fighting the Battle of Britain”.

While his whimsical fantasy stories feature an underlying warm sentiment, they are often juxtaposed with grotesque, darkly comic and sometimes harshly violent scenarios. [10] [12] The Witches, George's Marvellous Medicine and Matilda are examples of this formula. The BFG follows, with the good giant (the BFG or "Big Friendly Giant") representing the "good adult" archetype and the other giants being the "bad adults". This formula is also somewhat evident in Dahl's film script for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Class-conscious themes also surface in works such as Fantastic Mr Fox and Danny, the Champion of the World where the unpleasant wealthy neighbours are outwitted. [76] [125]

9. My Uncle Oswald

The book is notable for its introduction of the Uncle Oswald character, a wealthy hobbyist and gadabout who stars in both the first and last stories. (Although the first story seemingly presages his imminent decline and death.) He later appeared in Dahl's comic novel for adults, My Uncle Oswald. Oswald is a male fantasy figure described as "the greatest fornicator of all time", his adventures recounted by a nephew who inherits his diaries and decides to edit them for publication. Despite the stories in Switch Bitch being dark and cynical in tone, the Oswald tales are also humorous and satirical, resembling crude comic anecdotes. Overall the novel reads like a hastily written first draft, and is in dire need of editing. It was a complete flop on both sides of the Atlantic, and neither Scribner nor Collins showed any further interest in Dahl’ s stories. The book has subsequently remained out of print everywhere — apart from Holland, where it was reissued in 1982.

Beginning with ‘The Last Act’, Dahl then wrote some violently erotic stories, all of which were published in Playboy (they were too spicy for the New Yorker!). Most of these take a dark, rather Gothic view of sex: in ‘The Visitor’, for instance, Uncle Oswald, discovers that he may have slept with a leper, while ‘Bitch’ ends with him being assaulted by a hideous woman to whom he has administered a powerful aphrodisiac. These three stories — along with one other, ‘The Great Switcheroo’, in which two men devise a plan for going to bed with each others wives without the women realising — make up Dahl’s fourth collection, Switch Bitch, published in both Britain (Michael Joseph) and America (Knopf) in 1974.Dahl wrote several television and movie scripts. Several film adaptations of his books have also been created (all of those made during his lifetime Dahl famously despised), most notably: 'Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' (1971) The strange and complex personality who created these quirky tales of love and revenge has been expertly unravelled in a fascinating new biography by Jeremy Treglown, published on 21st March by Faber & Faber. Notable Quote: “Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.” This Dahl favorite, originally known as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a book, starred Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. An originally titled remake of the film, starring Johnny Depp, was released in 2005. 'The BFG' (1989, 2016) For a brief period in the 1960s, Dahl wrote screenplays. Two, the James Bond film You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, were adaptations of novels by Ian Fleming. [133] [134] Dahl also began adapting his own novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was completed and rewritten by David Seltzer after Dahl failed to meet deadlines, and produced as the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). Dahl later disowned the film, saying he was "disappointed" because "he thought it placed too much emphasis on Willy Wonka and not enough on Charlie". [135] He was also "infuriated" by the deviations in the plot devised by David Seltzer in his draft of the screenplay. This resulted in his refusal for any more versions of the book to be made in his lifetime, as well as an adaptation for the sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. [136]

Roald Dahl was born in 1916 at Villa Marie, Fairwater Road, in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales, to Norwegians Harald Dahl (1863–1920) and Sofie Magdalene Dahl ( née Hesselberg) (1885–1967). [14] [15] Dahl's father, a wealthy shipbroker and self-made man, had emigrated to the UK from Sarpsborg in Norway and settled in Cardiff in the 1880s with his first wife, Frenchwoman Marie Beaurin-Gresser. They had two children together (Ellen Marguerite and Louis) before her death in 1907. [16] Roald Dahl's mother belonged to a well-established Norwegian family of lawyers, priests in the state church and wealthy merchants and estate owners, and emigrated to the UK when she married his father in 1911. Dahl was named after Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen. [17] His first language was Norwegian, which he spoke at home with his parents and his sisters Astri, Alfhild, and Else. The children were raised in Norway's Lutheran state church, the Church of Norway, and were baptised at the Norwegian Church, Cardiff. [18] His maternal grandmother Ellen Wallace was a granddaughter of the member of parliament Georg Wallace and a descendant of an early 18th-century Scottish immigrant to Norway. [19] Roald Dahl is easily one of the most popular authors in the world. One Dahl book is sold every 2.6 seconds across the world and that is not all,he has sold over 300 million copies of his novels and short story collections. Due to their sheer popularity, his books have been translated into 63 different languages. If that isn’t enough to convince you that he is the one author your child deserves to read growing up, then here are some of his many masterpieces to change your mind. The stories have been criticised for their cruel and misogynistic elements. The central conceit of "The Last Act", in particular, has been described by Jeremy Treglown, Dahl's biographer, as having "no purpose as a mechanism other than to lead to a crudely sensationalist conclusion", [2] and by British novelist Zoe Heller as describing "in obscene detail the rape of a menopausal woman by a gynecologist." [3] In the same article for The New Republic she commented generally on Dahl's later adult stories: "the sexual sadism is at its crudest and the 'wit' at its most vestigial... [they] are almost unbearable to read." It goes without saying that Roald Dahl’s impressive repertoire of children’s books are classics. Road Dahl books are arguably some of the most widely recognized by both children and adults alike. Oxford University Press to capture Roald Dahl's naughtiest language for the first time: World Book Day!". Cardiff Times. 7 March 2019.

1. Man from the South

Dahl first established himself as a children’s writer in 1961, when he published the book James and the Giant Peach, a book about a lonely little boy living with his two mean aunts who meets the Old Green Grasshopper and his insect friends on a giant, magical peach. The book met with wide critical and commercial acclaim. 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' (1964)

Dahl was born in Wales to affluent Norwegian immigrant parents, and spent most of his life in England. He served in the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Second World War. He became a fighter pilot and, subsequently, an intelligence officer, rising to the rank of acting wing commander. He rose to prominence as a writer in the 1940s with works for children and for adults, and he became one of the world's best-selling authors. [6] [7] His awards for contribution to literature include the 1983 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the British Book Awards' Children's Author of the Year in 1990. In 2008, The Times placed Dahl 16th on its list of "The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945". [8] In 2021, Forbes ranked him the top-earning dead celebrity. [9] Many of Roald Dahl’s ideas were inspired by his childhood days and later experience. For example, in his autobiographical book Boy, Dahl says his school used to taste-test Cadbury’s chocolate. This led to the invention of the famous Willy Wonka and his chocolate factory. He also wrote about his experiences in the war, including in the book Going Solo. These years also inspired Dahl’s first book, The Gremlins. Pilots used to describe the malfunctions in their planes as little folkloric creatures causing havoc. These creatures made it into his first two novels, both published in the 40s, and an aborted Disney film. Grigsby, John L (1994). "Roald Dahl". In Baldwin, Dean (ed.). Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1945–1980. Detroit: Gale Research. ISBN 978-0-8103-5398-5. Gottlieb put up with Dahl’s frequent tantrums and increasingly rude letters until 1981. As a publisher, he had always operated on what he calls the ‘F*** You’ Principle, under which he was willing to accept “almost any amount of shit from any given writer” on the unspoken proviso that, when he could take no more, he would be free “to turn around and say ‘F*** you'”.

2. Poison

According to Jeremy Treglown, book fairs made him particularly irritable, not least because “they make a writer aware of other writers, and how highly some of them are regarded. If illness and pain were principal causes of Dahl’s cantankerousness, envy was another. Going Solo had been an inspired title for the second volume of his autobiography; he could never be a mere member of a group.” A boy happens upon a witch convention, where the witches are planning to get rid of every last child in England. The boy and his grandmother must battle the witches to save the children. 'Matilda' (1988) In ‘The Visitor’, Oswald Cornelius finds himself stranded for a night near Cairo at the mansion of wealthy business magnate Abdul Aziz, whose wife and daughter are highly attractive. Oswald plots to seduce either of the women and believes he has succeeded when a woman slips into his bedroom at night and spends several hours making love with him. However, his experience is limited because he cannot see the face of the seemingly mute lover. The following day, Oswald leaves the house and still doesn’t know which woman he slept with. Yet, in a darkly comedic turn, Dahl delivers a twist. Aziz reveals to Oswald that a second daughter is living in seclusion in another part of the house, as she has incurable leprosy. The first story in the collection is ‘The Visitor’. It is noted for its introduction of the Uncle Oswald character. This wealthy hobbyist would later appear in Dahl’s derided 1979 sex comedy novel, My Uncle Oswald, which was dismissed as a “festival of bad taste”, by the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. Notably, and in a stark inversion of the child heroes of his most famous stories, Oswald is a male fantasy figure described as “the greatest fornicator of all time” who is embroiled in lewd comic tales.