Roald Dahl was born September 13, 1916, in Llandaff, South Wales. At the age of eight, he was sent to a boarding school in southwest England and went on to attend Repton, a prestigious boarding school near Derby. One of his most vivid memories of his Repton years concerns the testing of chocolate bars. Cadbury, a famous chocolate manufacturer, would occasionally give the students some new types of chocolate bars and ask the students to rate them. While he was performing this pleasant task, Dahl would fantasize about working in the lab where these chocolates were invented. He had no idea, though, that he would one day base a book on these daydreams.

Upon graduating from Repton in 1933, he went to work for Shell Oil Company and was stationed in East Africa. With the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force and...