NAME : _____________________________
DATE: ______________________________
SUBJECT: ___________________________
Mischievous: (adjective) Someone who gets into lots of trouble.
Mischief: (noun) trouble
Severely: (adverb) Very badly; very much.
Horrors: (noun) Terrible things.
Career: (noun) A job you have forever.
Giant (adjective): Very, very big.
Practice (verb): To do over and over again to become good at something.
1. I hope my kids don’t get into any ________________________________ while I am
away.
2. If you break the law, you will be ___________________________ punished.
3. John is a very, very tall person. He is _________________________!
4. A war zone is a terribly place, filled with many
________________________________.
5. Gabby has a fulfilling _________________________________ as a teacher.
6. To become an awesome football player, you must ______________________.
7. Kareem is always getting into trouble. He is very ________________________
person.
Roald Dahl Biography
A young troublemaker
Roald Dahl was born September 13, 1916, in England. He spent his childhood
summers visiting his grandparents in Norway. He was a mischievous child, full of
energy, and from an early age he proved he was very good at finding trouble. His earliest
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memory was of pedaling to school at a very fast speed on his tricycle, with his two sisters
struggling to keep up as he whizzed around curves on two wheels.
After his father died when Dahl was four, his
mother sent him to school in England. Dahl first
attended Llandaff Cathedral School, where he had many
adventures in mischief. After he and many other
students were severely beaten by the principal for
placing a dead mouse in a candy jar, Dahl's mother
moved him to St. Peter's Boarding School and later to
Repton, an excellent private school. Dahl would later
describe his school years as "days of horrors" filled
with "rules, rules and still more rules that had to be
obeyed," which gave him lots of ideas for stories to
write. Even though he was not a good student, his mother asked him if he wanted to go
to University. His reply, which he wrote in the book about his childhood called Boy:
Tales of Childhood, was, "No, thank you. I want to go straight from school to work for a
company that will send me to wonderful faraway places like Africa or China."
The birth of a writer
After graduating from Repton, Dahl took a job
with the Shell Oil Company in Tanzania, Africa. In
1939 he joined a Royal Air Force training team in
Kenya, and served as a fighter pilot in the
Mediterranean during World War II (1939–1945).
Dahl hurt his head in a plane crash near Alexandria,
Egypt. When he got better, he was sent to
Washington, D.C., for work. There Dahl began his
writing career, writing short stories. Soon his
stories were in many other magazines. Dahl told Willa Petschek in a New York Times
Book Review profile that "as I went on, the stories became less and less realistic and
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more fantastic. But becoming a writer was pure fluke. Without being asked to, I doubt if
I'd ever have thought of it."
In 1943 Dahl wrote his first children's story, The Gremlins, and invented a new term
in the process. Gremlins were small creatures that lived on fighter planes and bombers
and caused all crashes. Through the 1940s and into the 1950s Dahl wrote short stories
for adults, known for writing stories with lots of death and unexpected twists. He won
three Edgar Allan Poe Awards from the Mystery Writers of America.
1. What kind of child was Roald Dahl like?
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
2. What punishment did he get for putting a dead mouse in a candy jar at school?
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
3. Why did he not want to go to University?
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
4. Where did Roald Dahl begin his writing career?
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
5. What kind of stories did Dahl write?
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
7. Was Dahl a good writer? How do you know?
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
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Inspired by his children
In 1953 Dahl married Hollywood actress Patricia Neal. Although their marriage
did not survive, they had five children together. Dahl made up stories for them each
night before they went to bed. He used these stories for his career as a children’s
author, which began when he wrote James and the
Giant Peach in 1961. It tells the fantastic tale of a
young boy who travels thousands of miles in a huge
peach with a strange a group of friends, such as a
talking spider. Dahl insisted that having to make up
stories night after night was good practice for
writing, telling the New York Times Book Review :
"Children are … highly critical. And they lose
interest so quickly. You have to keep things ticking along. And if you think a child is
getting bored, you must think up something that jolts it back. Something that tickles.
You have to know what children like."
Controversy
One way that Dahl delighted his readers was to take often write about bad things
happening to the adults who were mean to children, such as in Matilda, 1988. But even
some nice adults were badly treated such as the parents killed in a car crash in The
Witches, 1983. Many critics have objected to the rough treatment of adults. However,
Dahl explained in the New York Times Book Review that the children who wrote to him
always "pick out the most gruesome events as the favorite parts of the books.… They
don't relate it to life. They enjoy the fantasy." He also said that his "nastiness" was
payback. Beastly people must be punished."
Dahl said that adults may be upset by his books "because they are not quite as
aware as I am that children are different from adults. Children grosser than grownups.
They have a gross sense of humor. They are more cruel." Dahl often commented that the
key to his success with children was that he joined with them against adults.
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"The writer for children must be a jokey sort of a fellow," Dahl once
told Writer. "He must like simple tricks and jokes and riddles and other childish things.
He must be … inventive. He must have a really first-class plot."
Why a writer?
Dahl's children's fiction is known for its
sudden turns into the fantastic, its fast-moving
pace, and its harsh treatment of any adults stupid
enough to cause trouble for the young heroes.
Similarly, his adult fiction often had sudden twists
that threw light on what had been happening in
the story.
In his story, Boy: Tales of Childhood, Dahl wrote about what it was like to be an
author. He said that "two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely
drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a
different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into
normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock.… A person is a fool to become a
writer. His only [reward] is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul,
and that, I am sure, is why he does it."
Roald Dahl died in Oxford, England, on November 23, 1990.
1. How many children did Dahl have?
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
2. Are Dahl and his wife still married?
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
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3. What is the first children’s story Dahl writes?
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
4. What is the story James and the Giant Peach about?
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
5. Why were some adults unhappy about his books?
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
6. What kinds of stories did Dahl write?
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
7. Why does Dahl think writers like to write?
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
8. Dahl said that children are grosser than adults. Do you think this is true? Why or
why not?
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
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