James and the Giant Peach Study Guide

Dahl was born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1916 to Norwegian immigrant parents. When Dahl was still very young, his sister and father died within weeks of each other. Rather than return to Norway to live near family, Dahl’s mother remained in Wales so that her children could be educated in English schools. However, Dahl’s school days were unpleasant for him—he hated the hazing rituals and prevalence of corporal punishment. Following school, Dahl worked for Shell Oil until World War II, during which he served as a fighter pilot. In 1940, Dahl was seriously injured in a crash landing that temporarily robbed him of his sight. He flew again and served briefly as a flight instructor after his recovery, but he then became a diplomat in Washington, D.C. During his time in the U.S., Dahl published his first story, anecdotes about his time as a pilot. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Dahl published a number of short stories for adults as well as The Gremlins, his first book for children. James and the Giant Peach, however, catapulted him to fame and became the first of his many successful children’s novels. Dahl was married twice, first to actress Patricia Neal and then to Felicity Dahl. He had five children with Neal. In his lifetime, Dahl was a fierce advocate for immunization—his daughter died of measles in 1962—and posthumously, Felicity Dahl created Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity to support sick children. His novels have sold millions of copies and remain immensely popular. Dahl is often considered one of the most influential British authors of the late 20th century.

James and the Giant Peach is a children’s novel that focuses on the experience of its seven-year-old protagonist and pays little attention to the world of adults, but it’s nevertheless possible to see the influence of the Cold War on the novel. Following World War II, the United States doubled down on its policy of “containment,” or making sure that the communist U.S.S.R. didn’t spread communism elsewhere in the world. In the 1950s, this resulted in an arms race as the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. created and tested atomic weapons. In 1950s and 1960s, when Dahl was writing, fear of nuclear devastation loomed large. This fear even infiltrated pop culture—for instance, the original Twilight Zone television series, which ran from 1959 to 1964, often portrayed nuclear war and the catastrophic effects thereof in its episodes. In James and the Giant Peach, this fear is reflected in the way that English and American adults alike see the peach in the air and believe it must be a bomb sent by a foreign country. It’s likely, too, that this intense, emotionally charged political atmosphere is actually what encouraged Dahl to lean into fun and frivolity in his novels. Dahl’s focus on nonsense and children’s experiences and inner lives is perhaps a reaction against the tense, serious Cold War climate in which he was writing.

Like James and the Giant Peach, many of Roald Dahl’s other children’s novels feature magic and nonsense, adult characters who are evil and cruel, and bright children as protagonists. Though James and the Giant Peach is immensely popular, Dahl is perhaps better known for his later children’s novels like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda. While writing his children’s books, Dahl drew inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Published about a century before James and the Giant Peach, the Alice novels popularized the genre of nonsense literature—and, importantly, they were some of the first to present stories for children that weren’t simple morality tales. He also grew up listening to his mother, a Norwegian immigrant, tell him Norwegian folk and fairy tales, which influenced a number of his novels. In turn, Dahl has influenced a number of writers, actors, and directors—indeed, it’s possible to see James and the Giant Peach’s Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker as possible influences on J. K. Rowling in the creation of her characters Aunt Marge and Aunt Petunia. Though Dahl is best known for his children’s literature, he also wrote a number of short stories for adults that share some of the same odd, macabre elements.