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{{creator}}
[[File:Roald Dahl.jpg|thumb|300px|Roald Dahl in 1954]]
'''Roald Dahl''' (13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) is a Norwegian-British author who has become famous for his distinctively dark children's novels. His style is very [[Black Comedy]], and as a result the stories contain a good deal of more-than-usually sophisticated [[Nightmare Fuel]]. The fact that his target audience has been happily lapping all this up for decades now seems to imply that many kids actually ''like'' to be terrified (hey, it works for ''[[Doctor Who]]'').
Put bluntly, Dahl seems to have used writing for children as an acceptable means to beat on [[Humans Are the Real Monsters|all that he hated and feared in his fellow man]]. And on the evidence as presented, gosh there was a lot. The majority of his works in the genre feature adult villains menacing innocent young children (or, in a couple of memorable cases, fuzzy little animals) more or less [[For the Evulz|just because they can]]. Sometimes these are traditional boogeymen (e.g., The Grand High Witch in ''[[The Witches]]'', the Giants in ''[[The BFG]]'') but more often they're simply irredeemably vile and/or stupid grownups. Just how irredeemable is spelled out in exquisite detail on almost every page.
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Come to think of it, this may explain quite a bit about his appeal among, well, innocent young children. Quite a few not-so-innocent ones, too.
All of this would also be following [[Beauty Equals Goodness]] pretty closely if most of his small heroes and heroines weren't themselves deliberately very average-looking. They're also in large part [[Aesop]]-proof—being already the shining heroes of the piece simply by first recognizing and then refusing to give into the nastiness around them. They succeed in foiling the bad guys by virtue of their already-innate goodness, intelligence, and/or resourcefulness. If you're starting to suspect [[Black and White Morality|that there were very few grey areas in Dahl's POV]], you're right.
One other trope that he often averts is [[Infant Immortality]], though mostly off screen - kids can be hurt, and even killed or eaten, though these are almost always [[Red Shirt]]s. Another, subtler trademark of Dahl's is his [[Author Appeal|love of nostalgia]] for his own childhood (with which he generally manages to avoid alienating his younger readers) and his great love of [[Food Porn]]. Almost all of the [[Happy Ending|happy endings]] in his work revolve, in some way, around food. Although many of them [[Bittersweet Ending|aren't exactly happy]].
Traditionally, his books are illustrated by Quentin Blake, master of loopy sketchiness. Almost all of his juvenile books have been made into movies—the iconic ''[[Charlie and the Chocolate Factory]]'' more than once—and, curiously, no two of these movies were made by the same people (though [[Henry Selick]] almost broke this trend; after making ''James and the Giant Peach'', he was slated to direct ''Fantastic Mr. Fox'', but left to work on ''Coraline'' instead).
He was born on September 13, and wrote two autobiographies:
Most controversially (and the obvious reason why he never received a knighthood or other official UK honours) he was also quite the anti-Semite:
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Authors]]
▲[[Category:Roald Dahl]]
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