Roald Dahl Biography: Master of the Unexpected
For the first fifteen years of his writing career, Dahl concentrated on writing for adults. His short stories are classics of the storyteller’s craft. It comes as no surprise to learn that he took advice from Ernest Hemingway (“never use a colon or a semi-colon” and “when it starts going well, quit”.). He was not, by his own admission, a quick writer and might take six months on a story - “sometimes as much as a month on the first page”. And he refused to write at all unless he could come up with a really good plot.
Dahl’s first “story” was “A Piece of Cake”, which C S Forester urged him to write for the Saturday Evening Post in 1941. He went on to write another sixteen articles/stories for the Post. “They became less and less realistic and more fictional,” Roald said, “I began to see I could handle fiction.” The stories were published in a well-received collection, Over To You. At that point, Roald realised “since I could write, that’s what I'’d do.”
His stories were initially published in magazines such as the New Yorker, Harpers and Atlantic Monthly before being collected in book form. Mario Basini in the Western Mail describes the stories as “masterful… brief, punchy, with a devastating mixture of innocence and the macabre (which) summed up the brittle, sceptical, uneasy civilisation in which he wrote.” In the words of Sunday Tribune, “his stories are bizarre, inventive, clever, imaginative, spinechilling… For kindness and pleasantries, I suggest you look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, it is dark ingenuity you’re after with lashings of malice and a slice of humour then Roald Dahl is the man.”
Perhaps his most famous story is “Lamb to the Slaughter”, in which a woman beats her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb and then roasts the murder weapon and serves it up to the policemen who come to question her. “It wasn’t nasty,” Roald said, “I thought it was hilarious. What’s horrible is basically funny. In fiction.”
Dahl’s adult writing was favourably compared to O’Henry and Saki. He won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America three times.
Many of Roald’s short stories were televised for the hugely successful Tales of the Unexpected, which featured such stars as John Gielguid, Alec Guinness and Joan Collins.
Roald wrote two novels for adults - Sometime Never, published in 1948 and the first novel about nuclear war to be published in America following Hiroshima, and My Uncle Oswald, published in 1979.
Dahl’s first “story” was “A Piece of Cake”, which C S Forester urged him to write for the Saturday Evening Post in 1941. He went on to write another sixteen articles/stories for the Post. “They became less and less realistic and more fictional,” Roald said, “I began to see I could handle fiction.” The stories were published in a well-received collection, Over To You. At that point, Roald realised “since I could write, that’s what I'’d do.”
His stories were initially published in magazines such as the New Yorker, Harpers and Atlantic Monthly before being collected in book form. Mario Basini in the Western Mail describes the stories as “masterful… brief, punchy, with a devastating mixture of innocence and the macabre (which) summed up the brittle, sceptical, uneasy civilisation in which he wrote.” In the words of Sunday Tribune, “his stories are bizarre, inventive, clever, imaginative, spinechilling… For kindness and pleasantries, I suggest you look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, it is dark ingenuity you’re after with lashings of malice and a slice of humour then Roald Dahl is the man.”
Perhaps his most famous story is “Lamb to the Slaughter”, in which a woman beats her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb and then roasts the murder weapon and serves it up to the policemen who come to question her. “It wasn’t nasty,” Roald said, “I thought it was hilarious. What’s horrible is basically funny. In fiction.”
Dahl’s adult writing was favourably compared to O’Henry and Saki. He won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America three times.
Many of Roald’s short stories were televised for the hugely successful Tales of the Unexpected, which featured such stars as John Gielguid, Alec Guinness and Joan Collins.
Roald wrote two novels for adults - Sometime Never, published in 1948 and the first novel about nuclear war to be published in America following Hiroshima, and My Uncle Oswald, published in 1979.
Roald Dahl
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