when was roald dahl's first book published
Roald Dahl bibliography During the Second World War Dahl was a pilot in the Royal Air Force (RAF) until he crashed in the Libyan desert; the subsequent injuries left him unfit to fly. He was posted to Washington as an assistant air attaché, ostensibly a diplomatic post, but which also included espionage and propaganda work.[5] In 1942 the writer C.S. Forester asked him to provide details of his experiences in North Africa which Forester hoped to use in an article in The Saturday Evening Post. Instead of the notes which Forester expected, Dahl sent a finished story for which he was paid $900. The work led to The Gremlins, a serialised story in Cosmopolitan about a mischievous and fictional RAF creature, the gremlin; the work was published as Dahl's first novel in 1943.[6] Dahl continued to write short stories, although these were all aimed at the adult market. They were sold to magazines and newspapers, and were later compiled into collections, the first of which was published in 1946.[7] Dahl began to make up bedtime stories for the children, and these formed the basis of several of his stories.[8][9] His first children's novel, James and the Giant Peach, was published in 1961,[10] which was followed, along with others, by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), Danny, the Champion of the World (1975), The BFG (1982) and Matilda in 1988.[11]