The Complete Short Stories: Volume One

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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. Of his early writing career, Dahl told New York Times book reviewer Willa Petschek, "As I went on the stories became less and less realistic and more fantastic." He went on to describe his foray into writing as a "pure fluke," saying, "Without being asked to, I doubt if I'd ever have thought to do it."

Best Known For: Children's author Roald Dahl wrote the kids' classics 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,' 'Matilda' and 'James and the Giant Peach,' among other famous works.On 20 April 1941, Dahl took part in the Battle of Athens, alongside the highest-scoring British Commonwealth ace of World War II, Pat Pattle, and Dahl's friend David Coke. Of 12 Hurricanes involved, five were shot down and four of their pilots killed, including Pattle. Greek observers on the ground counted 22 German aircraft downed, but because of the confusion of the aerial engagement, none of the pilots knew which aircraft they had shot down. Dahl described it as "an endless blur of enemy fighters whizzing towards me from every side." [63] Discussing these stories in a recent article in the Times Literary Supplement, Frederic Raphael wrote: “There was a kind of camp in Dahl’s later outrageousness… No one else could have written ‘Bitch’— in which the hero is finally transformed into a walking, working phallus — without falling into tweeness or rising into pornography. The requirements of the marketplace served Dahl well; energy, rage, fancy, which might have taken monstrous wing — or been grounded entirely — were re-invested in toothsome ghoulishness.” One common theme amongst many Roald Dahl’s stories is a young child seeking revenge on evil adults and wrongdoers. Dahl has invented more than 500 memorable words and character names across his work, such as Oompa-Loompa, scrumdiddlyumptious, snozzcumbers and frobscottle. Another interesting (lesser-known) fact about Roald Dahl is that he named his fantasy language Gobblefunk. The Oxford University Press even created a unique Roald Dahl Dictionary, which featured nearly 8000 words he used in his stories.

a b c d "Roald Dahl". Contemporary Authors. Gale . Retrieved 5 February 2016. (subscription required)Dahl died, in Oxford, England, in 1990, at the age of seventy-four, and this September marks the centennial of his birth, in Cardiff, Wales. More than two hundred million copies of his books are in print, and they have inspired countless adaptations, most recently the Steven Spielberg film “The BFG,” based on Dahl’s 1982 book of the same name, about an orphan girl named Sophie—bad fortune, complete with adversarial adults and minders, is a staple of his writing for young readers—who, one night, witnesses the BFG, or “big friendly giant,” of the title, blowing dreams into the windows of sleeping children. This is among my favorite Dahl books, in part because of the giant’s idiosyncratic language (he likes a drink called “frobscottle,” which causes flatulence, or “whizpopping”) and in part because I used to read it to my daughter, also named Sophie, when she was small. This suggests something, I think, about why his work for children lingers: a whisper of nostalgia, a bit of history, personal or otherwise. Still, as Dahl also understands, nostalgia only goes so far, for childhood is a passing phase. “I’m wondering what to read next,” Matilda, another one of his beloved title characters, says, as if to make such an idea explicit. “I’ve finished all the children’s books.”