ENGL 2323.730 January 24, 2018 Roald Dahl: James and the Giant Peach Roald Dahl, the British children's author, was born on September 13, 1916 in Llandaff, Wales. He was the only boy in the marriage and had six sisters. When he was three years old, his father and older sister died, leaving his mother to support the rest of her children alone (Biography of Roald Dahl). After the death of his father, his mother placed him at Llandaff Cathedral School. Dahl got into trouble the first day when he tried to pull a prank. Shortly after the disciplinary action, Dahl's mother unenrolled him from Cathedral School and placed him at St. Peter's, which at the time was a boarding school. Before Dahl's father died, his wish was for his son to attend this school because St. Peter's had a reputation as an excellent academic school. Even if that was the case, the wild and mischievous young Dahl didn't seem to fit the role. He was then transferred a second time to Repton where he refused to take any instructions, only wanting to be free and travel the world. After graduating from Repton, he refused to accept his mother's offer to support him financially to continue his studies at the University of Oxford or Cambridge.Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay After returning from a trip to Newfoundland, he got a job with the Shell Oil Company in Tanzania, in Africa, where he worked for seven years (Roald Dahl). After his time in Tanzania, he became a World War II fighter pilot in the British Air Force. He was stationed in the Mediterranean where he encountered an emergency and had to crash land in Alexandria, Egypt. The emergency left him with serious injuries to his head, back and hip, requiring him to undergo a hip replacement and two back surgeries. He then transferred to Washington DC where he became Deputy Air Attaché. (Roald Dahl). Once he was transferred to Washington DC where he met a writer who would influence him to begin his writing career. CS Forester, a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post, encouraged Dahl to write down his various experiences and stories from World War II and publish them. Dahl wrote so effectively that Forester contacted Dahl and told him he should become a writer because he didn't have to change the play a bit. This is how his writing career began, with the article "Shot on Libya", published in 1942. After writing short stories for newspapers for a year, Dahl published his first children's book The Gremlins with the help from Walt Disney. The book wasn't really considered a children's book but caught the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt. Dahl quickly became a frequent visitor to the White House thanks to the support of Mrs. Roosevelt. His career in children's books didn't really take off until he and his wife had children in the 1960s (Biography of Roald Dahl). Dahl and his wife Patricia Neal, an award-winning actress, were married on July 2, 1953. A year later, they purchased the Little Whitefield farm, which he later renamed Gipsy House in England. The following year, Dahl's first daughter, Olivia, was born on April 20. Two years later, on April 11, his second daughter, Tessa, was born and on July 30, 1960, the two had their first son, Theo (Howard). It was around this time that Dahl began writing his first children's book. He found his ideas in the stories he made up for his daughters and son. These stories eventually sparked enough ideas for Dahl to write James and the Giant Peach and publish it in the United States in 1961 and six years later in the United Kingdom (Roald Dahl).