Dahl the Gardener

Celebrated author Roald Dahl was a man of many accomplishments. Finishing school, he worked for Shell Oil Co in London and East Africa before training as a Hawker Hurricane fighter pilot in World War II, scoring 'kills' over Greece. Seriously injured in a crash in the Western Desert, he was dispatched as an intelligence agent to the United States. He achieved success as the writer of macabre short stories before he first turned to writing children's books--James and the Giant Peach was not published until 1961. This introduced Old-Green Grasshopper, the Ladybird; the Centipede, and the Earthworm, characters that came from what was obviously a gardener's fertile mind.