But to hear about it in the Ladies Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, theirs was a love affair for the ages, and I can see how the reading public (mom included) might have been inclined to feel a little betrayed. In reality, their marriage had been rocky from the start, and the split not such a surprise. But then I read Sturrock's biography, and learned about the carefully choreographed press campaign that Dahl waged during Pat's rehabilitation, and the dozens of articles that portrayed them as the perfect family. When I was 10, and a huge fan of books like The BFG and The Witches, my mother sat me down and explained, in rather age-inappropriate detail, the saga of Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal, her near-death experience, how he'd nursed her back to health, and then had the nerve to cheat on her and leave her for a younger woman.Īt the time, I had no idea why my mother was following the love life of my favorite children's author.

Tracing a brilliant yet tempestuous ascent toward notoriety, Sturrock sheds new light on Dahl's need for controversy, his abrasive manner and his fascination for the gruesome and the macabre.Ī remarkable biography of one of the world's most exceptional writers, Storyteller is an intimate portrait of an intensely private man hindered by physical pain and haunted by family tragedy, and a timely reexamination of Dahl's long and complex literary career. It was a life filled with incident, drama and adventure: from his harrowing experiences as an RAF fighter pilot and his work in wartime intelligence, to his many romances and turbulent marriage to the actress Patricia Neal, to the mental anguish caused by the death of his young daughter Olivia.

Granted unprecedented access to the Dahl estate's extraordinary archives-personal correspondence, journals and interviews with family members and famous friends-Donald Sturrock draws on a wealth of previously unpublished materials that informed Dahl's writing and his life. His wild imagination, dark humor and linguistic elegance were less than fully appreciated by critics and readers alike until after his death. A single-minded adventurer and an eternal child who gave us the iconic Willy Wonka and Matilda Wormwood, Dahl was better known during his lifetime for his blunt opinions on taboo subjects-he was called an anti-Semite, a racist and a misogynist-than for his creative genius. But the man behind the mesmerizing stories has remained largely an enigma. In his lifetime Roald Dahl pushed children's literature into uncharted territory, and today his popularity around the globe continues to grow, with millions of his books sold every year.

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