Before he wrote “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Roald Dahl spent his 20s flying fighter jets and spying on the Roosevelts during World War II.
Crash-landing in a North African desert ultimately led to James and the Giant Peach , Matilda , and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory .
Remarkably, Roald Dahl, the beloved author of these books and many more classic works of children’s literature, was once a World War II spy for Great Britain, seducing heiresses and socialites and palling around with the Roosevelts to inure the Americans to the Allied cause.
However, while Dahl may have cut the figure of James Bond in his youth and a more acerbic Mister Rogers in his old age, he also had a dark side, hinted at by the shadows in his writings: anger, infidelity, and bigotry.
This is the true story of Roald Dahl: pilot, lover, writer, and spy.