Biography: Who is Roald Dahl?
By Cody Andrus
Roald Dahl was born on September 13, 1916, in Llandaff, Wales, to Norwegian parents. He was educated in England, where strict schools and rigid authority left a lasting impression. Those early years sharpened his awareness of power, obedience, and quiet resistance.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Dahl joined the Royal Air Force and flew as a fighter pilot in North Africa. In 1940, he was badly injured in a crash that ended his flying career. During his recovery, he was reassigned to diplomatic service in Washington, D.C., where his fluency, charm, and observational skill soon attracted attention.
Dahl was recruited into British intelligence and tasked with helping shift American opinion from neutrality toward intervention. Operating out of the British Embassy, he moved easily through Washington society, gathering information, cultivating contacts, and reporting back to London. His work placed him in proximity to senior politicians, journalists, and figures inside the Roosevelt administration.
The assignment required discretion rather than heroics. Dahl listened, remembered, and wrote detailed reports. He understood how to extract information without appearing to ask for it and how to steer conversations without leaving a trace. His success rested on social intelligence as much as strategy.
During this period, Dahl also began writing. Encouraged to put his wartime experiences on paper, he discovered a talent for compression, pacing, and controlled surprise. After the war, he turned increasingly to fiction, first for adults and later for children, carrying with him an instinct for power dynamics and moral imbalance.
His children’s books—James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and others—reflected a worldview formed by conflict. Authority figures were unreliable. Cleverness mattered. Justice arrived sideways. He wrote without sentiment and distrusted moral instruction stated outright.
Roald Dahl died in 1990 at the age of seventy-four. He is remembered as a writer of unusual precision and imagination, but also as someone who spent the war operating quietly inside systems of influence. He understood how stories shape belief, and how power often works best when it goes unnoticed.
If you enjoyed this article, check out Agent Garbo: The Spy Who Fooled Hitler
Jennet Conant, The Irregulars, Damien Lewis, Churchill’s Secret Warriors, BBC History, The New York Times Archives, Imperial War Museums, British Security Coordination Records.
