Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl

By Donald Sturrock

Anyone who ever wished as a child to meet Willy Wonka or hang out with the BFG will be fascinated to learn in this engrossing, authorized biography of the late Roald Dahl that his own life was far, far more strange than even his fiction.

Twenty years after his death, Roald Dahl's bestselling stories continue to inspire and entertain children around the globe. But the man behind the stories remains an enigma. Despite his astonishing life as a Norwegian growing up in Wales, whose father died when he was just five, and as an ace fighter pilot, British intelligence agent, and husband for a while to one of Hollywood's top stars, Dahl nonetheless persistently embroidered the truth about himself, rewrote history, ignored reality, and defended his deep vulnerabilities with outlandish and wilfully provocative remarks. Facts bored him.

As his authorized biographer, Donald Sturrock, a wonderful writer and careful researcher, has drawn on Dahl's many previously unexamined files and a vast body of unpublished letters for this nuanced and engrossing narrative of the storyteller's long, adventurous life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 21, 2010
• ISBN: 9781551993447

Donald Sturrock

Donald Sturrock worked at the BBC for ten years as a writer, producer and director. Since his departure from the BBC in 1992, he has written and directed a number of television programmes, including a film about Roald Dahl for the BBC.

Reviews for Storyteller

[jasonpettus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)If you're anything like me, you mostly only know British author Roald Dahl through his deliciously dark children's tale Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as well as maybe a handful of other Young Adult titles like James and the Giant Peach, Matilda and The Witches, all of which have been made into major Hollywood movies in recent years. But as this first-ever authorized biography from veteran journalist Donald Sturrock shows, both Dahl's life and career were a lot more dramatic and event-filled than that; a dashing and adventurous fighter pilot in WW2 Africa, he eventually married an Oscar-winning actress, developed the most notorious Disney Golden Age cartoon to never actually get produced, briefly hosted a "Twilight Zone"-style creepy television series, and had an entire career as a subversive adult author before turning to children's stories in middle-age, along the way incidentally co-inventing a new type of medical valve that would save thousands of lives, and co-inventing a new type of rehabilitative stroke therapy that's now the industry standard. And to the family's credit, this engrossing book doesn't shy away from the dark parts of Dahl's life either, despite it being endorsed by them; he was a fatally egotistical philanderer as well, a mean drunk who would often pick fights at dinner parties with strangers just to liven up the evening, who played hardball over royalties with a series of publishing companies and who famously declared in the '80s that Salman Rushdie deserved the Islamic fatwa that had been issued against him. But as this balanced look at a topsy-turvy life shows, Dahl was also charming, quietly generous with his time and money, and apparently truly amazing when it came to interacting with children, a passionate advocate of YA literature in his later years who helped legitimize that genre in the first place. A fascinating and surprise-filled bio, well worth your time if you've ever been a fan of any of his books.Out of 10: 9.4

[lyndatrue · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I always loved Dahl, and it was nice to see someone do him the justice he deserved. It covers it all, including his wartime service, and it was remarkable in the depth of research.

[emilyingreen · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm over biographies of "great" men. Inspiring right up to the part where they start cheating on their wives.

[bunwat_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Started out interested and enthusiastic, and then I just ground to a halt about halfway through under the weight of too much detail without enough of a purpose or through line. I know that people's lives don't actually have a plot, but biographers need to find something to pull the various bits and bobs of information into some sort of coherent shape. Make me laugh, or tell me something that informs me about the person's character, or give me an insight into the trajectory of why he made the decisions that sent him here or there. Don't just give me a chronological accounting of the various things he did. There's wheat among the chaff but way too much chaff, so I'm going to read something else now. I may come back to winnow for more wheat some other time.