The VERB - December '08

~ Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Wales.

~ His Norwegian parents, Harald and Sophie, named him after the explorer Roald Amundsen, a national hero in Norway.

~ When Roald was four years old, one of his older sisters died of complications from appendicitis.

~ About a month later, his father died of pneumonia.

~ Roald's mother was left to raise two stepchildren along with her four biological children. Roald was her only son.

~ She was determined to carry out her husband's dying wish: that his children receive an English education. She sold all her jewelry to pay for Roald's tuition at Repton, a private school in Derbyshire.

~ Roald hated schools in Wales and England, and those who ruled them. He was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed to wound other boys. These experiences greatly influenced the stories he later wrote.

~ At eighteen, Dahl didn’t want to go to college, he wanted to travel. He joined an expedition to Newfoundland. Then back in England, he took a job with the Shell Company which sent him all the way to Tanzania.

~ When World War II broke out, Dahl served in the Royal Air Force in Greece, Syria and Libya, where he was shot down. While recovering from his head wounds, he had strange dreams that later found their way into his stories.

~ After the war, Dahl began to write about his RAF adventures. The Saturday Evening Post bought his short story, "A Piece of Cake," and paid him $1,000.

~ Encouraged, he continued to write. His collection of short stories, Someone Like You, and its sequel, Kiss Kiss, were highly successful. His story The Gremlins was later made into a film.

~ Sometime Never, a story of nuclear war, was published in the US in 1948 by Scribner's, and in England a year later by Collins. It bombed horribly.

~ In 1953 Dahl married the successful actress Patricia Neal. At the age of 38, while pregnant with their fifth child, she had a stroke. They divorced in 1983, and Dahl married Felicity Ann Crossland.

~ In 1961, Dahl penned James and the Giant Peach. It was first published in the United States, but took six years before Dahl found a publisher in Britain.

~ In Dahl's autobiography, Boy: Tales of Childhood, he remembers one of the few happy moments at school when each boy received a plain gray cardboard box from chocolate manufacturer Cadbury. The boys were asked to eat and critique the twelve new candy bars inside. Dahl took this assignment very seriously, and used to dream of working in a chocolate company’s invention room. This was the inspiration behind one of his most popular novels, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory.

~ In 1983, Dahl's book The Witches won the Whitbread Children's Book Award. The judges described it as "deliciously disgusting."

~ During his career, Dahl received three Edgar Allan Poe Awards and the World Fantasy Convention Lifetime Achievement award.

~ Dahl died of leukemia at his home, Gipsy House, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, at the age of 74. He is buried in the cemetery at the parish church of St. Peter and St. Paul.