Roald Dahl: A Study of His Life and Writing Advice

I fell in love with reading when I was a young kid, and one of the authors whose stories captivated me was Roald Dahl. His stories were enthralling, unique, and harsh; they were filled with a sense of adventure unlike anything I had ever read. They were stories in which not even the protagonist was safe from harm or dangerous transformation, like in The Witches. The automatic boredom tool of plot armor did not apply to Roald Dahl’s characters, which made reading his works extremely memorable and engaging. For instance, when the protagonist of The Witches organizes a heist involving sneaking into the room of the villain, the sense of threat—and the sense of the very real chance of failure—was palpable. 

Roald Dahl’s works were a staple of my early childhood. As such, I remember the stories with fondness.  Roald Dahl was an expert at writing children’s stories—however, the man himself had a tumultuous and awful childhood, which is as crystal-clear in my mind as some of his fictional stories. As I’ve grown older, I discovered some facts that show him as far from being a good man—and that leaves a sour taste in my mouth. He was anti-Semitic, a womanizer in his youth, and had a “native nastiness” and was apparently also dishonest and spiteful. Considering he is one of the best-known children's authors ever, this contradiction is not only nasty but highly uncomfortable to think about. Some of the most adventurous stories I’d ever read were written by someone nearly as terrible as his own villains? How could this be? But denial is foolish and will get us nowhere—just like Dahl’s characters, we must confront the unpleasantness of the things before us and learn what we can from them.

Dahl’s Life

Roald Dahl was born in September of 1916, in Cardiff in the United Kingdom. He had far from a happy childhood because he was sent off to boarding school when he was only seven years old. His 1984 autobiography, Boy: Tales of Childhood, describes the horrific abuse he endured at Llandaff Cathedral School. The stories of what happened to him and his classmates are so disturbing they’ve stuck with me to this very day. It’s nearly unfathomable to me that these authoritative institutions would endorse and get away with mentally and physically abusing children. When he and his friends dropped a dead mouse into the candy jar of a mean candy store owner, eight-year-old Dahl got caned with such strength that he had trouble sitting down for the rest of his life. The teachers and teachers’ assistants handled the young children with unimaginable cruelty—the beatings were observed and endorsed by one of his friend’s mothers. His traumatizing experiences here—as well as the school he attended after that, St. Peter’s, in 1925—created an us-vs.-them rift between the adults and students. The teachers at St. Peter’s would censor students’ letters home, so they were unable to tell their parents how terrible it was at they wanted to leave. Much later, Dahl said his school years were "days of horrors" filled with "rules, rules and still more rules that had to be obeyed." This rift, this way of viewing the world, would affect Roald Dahl’s later writing and was perhaps how he got so good at writing for children in the first place.

When he was old enough to escape school, he got a job with the Shell Oil Company and traveled to East Africa, and then joined the Royal Air Force when World War II began. During his seventh year of being a pilot, he crashed in the Libyan desert which resulted in “life-threatening injuries to his head, face, and back.” While it’s unclear whether he was gunned down by enemies or ran out of fuel, for he later wrote of both, this horrific experience—for he was badly burnt and his nose pushed in, and his skull was fractured—gave him the “fateful push” to start writing. The novelist C.S. Forester asked Roald Dahl to write about his crash in the desert, and he was “so impressed by the result” he sent it to the Saturday Evening Post, where it was published on Aug. 1, 1942. 

During this same time (1942–43,) Roald Dahl spent several years in the United States, demonstrating “his considerable charm” by delivering “a series of speeches about what it was like to be a RAF man” to raise awareness for the British war cause. While in America, he wrote a story about gremlins invading and causing havoc within RAF planes; it gained “a tremendous amount of attention,” resulted in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt inviting him to the White House, and also captivated Walt Disney so much that he brought Roald Dahl to Hollywood to talk about making a movie (although this never came to fruition.)

Some years after that, in 1953, he met and married Patricia Neal, an American actress. Their daughter Oliva died from complications with measles when she was merely seven, and their son “spent years in recovery” after being grievously injured when he was “crushed against the side of a cab.”

Donald Sturrock, author of the Roald Dahl biography Storyteller, said they were “bound together by these two tragedies that happened quite early on with their children,” and that the marriage would become one of great strength (even though it was ultimately doomed to fail after thirty years.)

Patricia suffered a stroke when she was 39, and Roald oversaw the “intense” therapy and rehabilitation himself. While the intense rehab may seem almost cruel to others—this uncomfortably truthful article describes it as Dahl bullying his wife into regaining her mobility—Sturrock says that what Roald Dahl did was pioneering at the time. “It's almost become standard practice, his idea that you must stimulate a stroke victim quite early on and quite extremely in order to get them back to health,” he states.

Dahl’s Stories

 The most famous of Roald Dahl’s works are The Witches, The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Matilda. I have fond memories of reading all of them for the first time. They’re all captivating with highly imaginative plots—and of course, everyone is familiar with the 1996 movie version of Matilda starring Mara Wilson, and the Chocolate Factory adaptation with beloved actor Gene Wilder. One of the producers of Matilda was actually one of Dahl’s children, Lucy, and the movie alludes to her with the similarly named Lissy Doll as a clever tribute. Suffice it to say that these three most iconic works by Dahl continue to be remembered and beloved by many.

The Witches is definitely my favorite, and one of the reasons is because the hero doesn’t escape Scott-free in the end. He is permanently altered by what he goes through. This gives the story a genuine sense of consequence and weight even after the central villain is defeated. It tells the reader that what just happened mattered. As this blog from The Science Survey acutely states, “the ending of The Witches leaves some question marks also made me realize that you don’t need closure in order to tell a good story.”

Dahl’s stories were also famous for how he used words; he playfully shaped them as if they were clay and like no other author has done before. Dahl’s The BFG has words such as “gobblefunking,” “phizzwizard,” “squifflerotters,” and “bogswinkles.” In The Science Survey’s “The Swashboggling Life and Legacy of Roald Dahl”, Emily Piao states, “When I was a kid reading his works, they really helped me paint an image of the characters and plot in my head. His words are what really makes his books unique.”

For me, these imaginary words drew me into Dahl’s stories even further, giving the characters in any of them a vocabulary all their own. Unfamiliar with these new words at first, they require you to engage with the story as you figure out what they mean through context. Additionally, part of their charm comes from the fact that they’re onomatopoeias—a word that depicts a sound—which is “a literary device that young children love,” in the words of the previously linked-to The Science Survey article.

However, Roald’s Dahl’s most well-known works also come with lots of nasty controversy connected to the author himself. Unfortunately and uncomfortably, Roald Dahl was anti-Semitic, and many people describe the book and the two film versions of The Witches of being filled with nods to anti-Semitism. Even more unfortunately, they aren’t coincidences; there is no room for debate, for Dahl even seemed to justify Hitler’s onslaught against them by telling The New Stateman in 1983, “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” This was said the same year The Witches got published. While his family has apologized for his anti-Semitism, the apology was “buried deep” on the website and didn’t get sent to any Jewish organizations; two young Jewish readers even sent Dahl a letter saying they loved his books but were hurt on his views about them and begged him to change his mind.

All of this has led to the censoring of his books. Words that are anti-Semitic, racist, and negatively depict overweight characters get removed. This censorship, in turn, has resulted in backlash. According to this article by The Guardian, such actions are the latest scuffling disagreement concerning cultural sensitivity and the need to “protect young people from cultural, ethnic and gender stereotypes in literature and other media,” and that to mangle books of the past into fitting into modern definitions “risk undermining the genius of great artists and preventing readers from confronting the world as it is.” Personally, I couldn’t agree more—while learning about Dahl’s racist and anti-Semitic views is unsettling, disgusting, and disappointing, such censorship invites history to repeat itself by pretending the unfairness of the past never existed. It must be confronted to be overcome.

 Dahl’s Writing Techniques and Legacy

Dahl’s legacy and his writing techniques are connected. As previously mentioned, his magical methods of creating new words keep his stories engaging and memorable, although that is simply scratching the surface—the unimaginable cruelty he suffered during his hellish school days—with the domination of the powerful over the powerless—impacted his as well as his outlook on the writing process itself.

According to “Authors, Developing Words,” Dahl said in the New York Times Book Review that “beastly people must be punished.” The fact his mean adult characters have terrible things happen to them because they were awful to the protagonist could be a secret yearning for fighting back in any way against the horrific treatment he was subjected to in his childhood, even if the resistance and revenge is fictional. In addition to this, he often stated his success with children came from the fact he sided with them against the adults. When creating stories, he always considered what the children would want because of their view on things: “Children are … highly critical. And they lose interest so quickly. You have to keep things ticking along. And if you think a child is getting bored, you must think up something that jolts it back. Something that tickles. You have to know what children like."

He was constantly aware that children were different from adults in a way that he claimed most adults did not understand, that they were “much more vulgar than grownups” and that their sense of humor was “coarser”—perhaps explaining the constant undercurrent of tonal horror and grossness in much of his writing. Dahl was always on the side of the children. This idea of isolation and facing a mighty, cruel enemy all by yourself even influenced his view of the act of writing itself. In his rules for writing, number five states the need for self-discipline because, “You are working alone. No one is employing you. No one is around to give you the sack if you don’t turn up for work, or to tick you off if you start slacking.”  

Roald Dahl’s books have been translated into 58 languages and sold 250 million copies. He made a legend for himself by telling fantastically captivating stories where child protagonists must confront and overcome horrific people and scenarios to survive. Horrifying experiences are a part of life for everyone no matter their age, and Dahl did not shy away from that—and that’s why his legacy as the world’s number-one writer for children is indisputable.