His betrayed first wife called him ‘Roald the Rotten’ and it is easy to see why the author — the giant of children’s literature, with one book sold every 2.6 seconds — is considered controversial in the era of .Dahl, who died in 1990, was a philanderer and a bully; often ‘ratty’ to his nearest and dearest and sometimes downright cruel. To outsiders he was intimidating, boorish, rude and also an outspoken anti-semite.In print, this wickedness translated into gloriously subversive humour and a delight in shattering taboos — but he was always close to the edge. Indeed, Dahl himself consented to being rewritten way back in 1974, when his depiction of the Oompa Loompas as a tribe of African pygmies in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was considered racist.
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