Roald Dahl signing books in Amsterdam in 1988. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

“A little magic can take you a long way.”

No line written by Roald Dahl is quoted more than the above. Alas, I’m not sure he ever actually penned it. His novel James and the Giant Peach, the supposed source in most citations, doesn’t include it. I suspect it’s from a Disney promotion for the 1996 movie of the same name. But the sentiment—nay, conviction—behind the quote captures both the message of that book and of Dahl’s larger corpus of children’s books in general. So let’s go with it.

The many movie adaptations of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Dahl’s other stories are probably how most people are exposed to Dahl’s work nowadays, though if you were a bookish kid in the 1960s through the 1980s in the Anglophone world, you likely devoured books like Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Matilda, The Big Friendly Giant, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Danny the Champion of the World. Along the way, you entered a world of childlike wonder that was also frightening and dangerous, not least because of the menace of evil adults. 

There’s a kindhearted adult or two in all of Dahl’s stories, of course, but they are usually outnumbered by the parsimonious gluttons and sociopaths hiding in plain sight who intrude on the magical worlds of children who are materially poor but imaginatively rich. 

Those children’s books earned Dahl fame in life and after: In a survey a decade after his death, he was named Great Britain’s favorite author (beating out J. K. Rowling, which is meet and just, because Harry Potter couldn’t hold a candle to Charlie or Danny or James). 

I devoured Dahl’s books as a child: the famous Charlie novels; James and the Giant Peach; Matilda; Fantastic Mr Fox; The BFG; The Twits; The Witches; Danny, the Champion of the World and more. I moved on later to his autobiographical works like Boy and Going Solo and his short stories in Tales of the Unexpected and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. Dahl’s protagonists were saucier, more clever and more likable versions of the heroes of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, something Dahl referenced himself in Matilda:

“I like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” Matilda said. “I think Mr. C.S. Lewis is a very good writer. But he has one failing. There are no funny bits in his books.”
“You are right there,” Miss Honey said.
“There aren’t many funny bits in Mr. Tolkien either,” Matilda said.

Dahl was born in 1916 in Cardiff, Wales, to Norwegian parents who immigrated to Great Britain. The language of his childhood home was Norwegian, and Dahl was baptized into the Church of Norway (and named after the famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who became the first human to reach the South Pole five years before Dahl’s birth). The family was financially well-off but suffered significant tragedies, including the death of Dahl’s father and sister when he was 3 years old.

Dahl attended various British boarding schools before taking a job with Shell Oil in East Africa in 1934. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1939 at the onset of World War II, eventually becoming a fighter pilot and earning ace status. A plane crash in 1940 landed Dahl in the hospital with a fractured skull and other injuries. In later years, he would credit his head injury with triggering his creative genius, transforming him from “a promising oil executive with no literary talents” into a wordsmith.

Dahl’s writing career began during the war with a 1942 story for the Saturday Evening Post on his experiences as a pilot. A book for children about the legendary creatures that bedeviled planes and pilots, The Gremlins, followed a year later. Between 1961 and 1988, he published his famous children’s novels as well as adult fiction, including a number of short stories that became radio plays and television episodes (including several for “The Twilight Zone”), some rather more salacious than his usual fare. Dahl also wrote a number of plays (“The Honeys” was panned in America in 1955 by Theophilus Lewis), essays and screenplays over the course of his career—including the James Bond flick “You Only Live Twice” and the children’s movie “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

During these years Dahl also experienced significant personal tragedies, including a car accident in 1960 in which his newborn son was badly injured and the death of a daughter from measles two years later. In 1965, his first wife Patricia suffered a number of cerebral aneurysms that cost her the ability to walk and talk for a time. Combined with the traumas of his childhood, these experiences caused him to lose his faith; he later told friends he “desperately wanted to believe in Christianity and couldn’t.”

In all his writings, Dahl played with language to an extent unseen in English since Lewis Carroll; there’s even now an Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary that compiles the more than 500 words he added to the language. One example: While many of us consider “scrumdiddlyumptious” to be a catchphrase of Ned Flanders on “The Simpsons,” it’s a word Dahl popularized in 1982’s The BFG. 

Dahl’s work faced significant scrutiny and criticism after his death, with the result that some of his children’s books were targeted for bowdlerization (there’s a word Dahl would love!) in recent years. In some cases the concern is clear: Several of his books include viciously racist and misogynist caricatures, and Dahl also made a number of openly antisemitic comments in public over the years. His family and the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre have both condemned those statements in the last few years. 

Unfortunately, some other examples of his supposed literary malfeasance feel more like scalps to be collected by a culture gone mad over safe spaces. In 2023, his publisher, Puffin Books, hired “sensitivity readers” to scour Dahl’s works for offensive material needing to be purged—including most references to characters as fat, stupid or crazy. Because none of us is ever any of those things, you see, and children never use those words. 

After backlash from the general public and many authors (including Margaret Atwood, who said “Good luck with Roald Dahl. You’re just really going to have to replace the whole book if you want things to be nice”), Puffin agreed to release unexpurgated versions of Dahl’s books alongside the, well, nice ones.

America contributors have been kinder to Dahl over the years, recognizing that Dahl’s stories could be macabre and daring in ways that young readers actually prefer. “My children want to read what Dahl called, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, ‘fine, fantastic tales, of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales,” Anna Keating wrote in her 2016 essay for America, “Why Roald Dahl’s tales are as relevant as ever.” “They want books about sly foxes and little boys who steer giant peaches across the sky. They want to hear about people-eating giants, but mostly about the little girl named Sophie who took those giants down.”

In a 2024 review of the film “Wonka,” Colm O’Shea made a novel argument for Dahl the theologian. “While not explicitly allegorical like C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series, Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a book that implores a theological reading almost as much as The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,” he wrote, adding that Willy Wonka might be something of a Christ figure. He is “thwarted by a cast of characters with inexact parallels to high priests and turncoat apostles,” and some “Pharisee-like competitors are shocked at his insolence in challenging their authority.”

Or what if the character of Willy Wonka is Dahl’s way of working out a Job-like anguish over the sufferings in his own life that drove him to atheism? Here is O’Shea:

Like an Old Testament God, he giveth and he taketh away—part fairy godmother, part gingerbread-house witch. He tests poor, long-suffering Charlie to see if the boy will remain dutiful, honest and loving in the face of wrath. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has some overlap with the Book of Job, in that it is a profession of faith of the most difficult kind. Humans fear the faith of Job; it offers no protection from suffering—the superstitious part of us believes this faith might even invite punishment. Job’s God is implacable, capricious, possibly insane.

The reader can be forgiven if treating Willy Wonka as Christ or Yahweh feels like a stretch—though there has to be some catechism lurking back there: Dahl’s depictions of the other children in Charlie, for example, do read exactly like a catalogue of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Dahl died in 1990 of blood cancer at the age of 74, and was eulogized in the British press as the “Pied Piper of the macabre.” His 49 books have sold almost half a billion copies worldwide, and movie directors from Steven Spielberg to Tim Burton to Wes Anderson are in love with his characters and plots. Netflix now owns the Roald Dahl Story Company, the family firm that controls the rights to his work. 

So be prepared for more Willy Wonkas in your future. The true fans, of course, know that Charlie was the real hero all along.

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is “Harrowing,” by Dan O’Brien. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.