The Landlady

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About Roald Dahl

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Deeper Study About Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1916 to wealthy Norwegian immigrants. His father was a successful shipbroker who had two children by a previous wife and remarried to Dahl’s mother in 1911. When Dahl was 3 years old, his father and sister died within weeks of each other, he from pneumonia and she from appendicitis. Rather than move back to Norway to be closer to the support of family, Dahl’s mother decided to raise young Roald in Wales so that he could attend English schools. At age 13, Dahl began attending the renowned Repton boarding school. Dahl’s experiences at English boarding schools were formative and often unpleasant. He later would recount his negative experiences with bullying and corporal punishment in his 1984 autobiographical novel, Boy. Dahl wrote letters home to his mother frequently. Upon his mother’s death, Dahl discovered that she had saved his letters and they were subsequently published and broadcast on the BBC in 2016 as Love from Boy – Roald Dahl's Letters to His Mother.

After graduating, Dahl elected not to attend college, instead traveling through Newfoundland on an expedition with the Public Schools Exploring Society. In 1937, Dahl took a job posting with Shell Petroleum Company in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where he worked from 1937 to 1939. When World War II broke out, Dahl joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) and flew as a fighter pilot. His adventures in the RAF led him to write his first collection of stories in 1946, called Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying. Dahl became a best-seller in 1953 with the publication of Someone Like You, another collection of stories. Dahl then turned primarily to writing stories for children. With the publication of James and the Giant Peach in 1961 and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964, Dahl established himself as one of the 20th century’s most beloved writers for children. He went on to write a number of children’s classics, including Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970), The Witches (1983), and Matilda (1988), all of which were later adapted to film. Roald Dahl died in 1990, at the age of 74.