He lost both his elder sister (from appendicitis) and father (pneumonia) when he was only three. Roald Dahl was born to Norwegian parents in Llandaff, south Wales, on 13th September 1916. The strange and complex personality who created these quirky tales of love and revenge has been expertly unravelled in a fascinating new biography by Jeremy Treglown, published on 21st March by Faber & Faber. Unfortunately there is, in all of them, an underlying streak of cruelty and macabre unpleasantness, and a curiously adolescent emphasis on sex.” Noel Coward hit the nail on the head when he wrote in his diary, after reading Dahl’s second collection, Someone Like You, forty years ago: “The stories are brilliant and his imagination is fabulous. They are among the most memorable written by a British author over the past half-century. His macabre contes cruel have been reprinted many times, and were successfully televised in 1979-80 as “ Tales of the Unexpected“. Roald Dahl was not only the bestselling children’s author of his time, he was also one of the most accomplished writers of adult short stories. Our main feature this month looks at this aspect of Dahl’s work. Nevertheless, it is these adult works that now attract the highest prices from collectors, with his earliest titles fetching three-figure sums in their dustjackets. He was less successful as a novelist, his first long work of fiction, Sometime Never, disappearing without trace when it was published in 1949, and his second, My Uncle Oswald (1979), faring little better. He was particularly popular in America, where he received over $2,000 a story! Between 19, he published four collections of adult tales that won him a huge readership on both sides of the Atlantic.
In recent years, Dahl’s immense success as a children’s author has tended to eclipse his earlier career as a short-story writer. Roald Dahl once boasted, with a typical lack of modesty, that his name was known to virtually every child in the western world, but he might also have added that he was a familiar figure to quite a few adults as well.
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