It was a life filled with incident, drama and adventure: from his harrowing experiences as an RAF fighter pilot and his work in wartime intelligence, to his many romances and turbulent marriage to the actress Patricia Neal, to the mental anguish caused by the death of his young daughter Olivia. Granted unprecedented access to the Dahl estate's extraordinary archives-personal correspondence, journals and interviews with family members and famous friends-Donald Sturrock draws on a wealth of previously unpublished materials that informed Dahl's writing and his life. His wild imagination, dark humor and linguistic elegance were less than fully appreciated by critics and readers alike until after his death. A single-minded adventurer and an eternal child who gave us the iconic Willy Wonka and Matilda Wormwood, Dahl was better known during his lifetime for his blunt opinions on taboo subjects-he was called an anti-Semite, a racist and a misogynist-than for his creative genius. But the man behind the mesmerizing stories has remained largely an enigma. In his lifetime Roald Dahl pushed children's literature into uncharted territory, and today his popularity around the globe continues to grow, with millions of his books sold every year.
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