A writer of both children's fiction and short stories for adults, Roald Dahl (1916-1990) is best known as the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the story of a poor boy who because of his ho...
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Roald Dahl was flying over the African desert for the Royal Air Force during World War II when he was forced to make an emergency landing. He wrote in his first short story, "A Piece of Cake," "I reme...
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Roald Dahl began his career as a short-story writer after suffering through the horrors of severe canings and other punishments in oppressive British schools during the 1920s and 1930s and after endur...
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Roald Dahl was one of the most successful writers of children's books ever, both in terms of copies sold and money made. Ten months before his death, the five top-selling children's books in Britain w...
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Critical Essay by Peter Kemp
Hardly straining itself in the originality line, [My Uncle Oswald] shows Oswald involved with the discovery of a pill so potent that any man who takes it is unable to pre...
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Critical Essay by David Cook
If only Uncle Oswald had had a twist—or, better still, a knot—in his member, we might have been spared many of Roald Dahl's descriptions of its size,...
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Critical Essay by Mollie Hardwick
If, as the blurb informs us, [My Uncle Oswald] is the funniest romp in years, what have all the others been like? This fine story-teller used to write riveting tales...
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Critical Essay by Rhoda Koenig
We know that God has a sense of humor, said de Maupassant, from the manner he has chosen for us to reproduce ourselves. This view of copulation as undignified and absur...
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Critical Essay by Vance Bourjaily
"My Uncle Oswald" provides four or five hours of effortless reading and some amusing scenes, mostly of the kind film makers have taught us to call soft...
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Critical Essay by Phoebe-lou Adams
[My Uncle Oswald] looks like a recipe for pornography, and to some extent the novel is exactly that, but mere pornography is repetitious. Mr. Dahl's scheme p...
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