Roald Dahl

(1916 - 1990)

In 1939, while in his early twenties, Roald Dahl left his Shell Oil job in Tanzania and traveled to Kenya to enlist in the Royal Air Force. He sustained serious injuries when he crash-landed his biplane in the Libyan desert, an experience that he later fictionalized in his first published story, in the Saturday Evening Post. He published two story collections, Someone Like You and Kiss, Kiss, before turning his attention to children’s books. James and the Giant Peach was published in 1961 and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964.