Wikipedia:Today's featured list/November 8, 2019
The works of British author Roald Dahl have been translated into 59 languages and have sold more than 200 million books worldwide. Roald Dahl was "the most popular writer of children's books since Enid Blyton", according to Philip Howard, the literary editor of The Times. During the Second World War Dahl was a pilot in the Royal Air Force (RAF) until he crashed in the Libyan desert; the subsequent injuries left him unfit to fly. The writer C. S. Forester asked him to provide details of his experiences in North Africa which Forester hoped to use in an article in The Saturday Evening Post. Instead of the notes which Forester expected, Dahl sent a finished story for which he was paid $900. The work led to The Gremlins, a serialised story in Cosmopolitan about a mischievous and fictional RAF creature, the gremlin; the work was published as Dahl's first novel in 1943. His first children's novel, James and the Giant Peach, was published in 1961, which was followed, along with others, by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), Danny, the Champion of the World (1975), The BFG (1982) and Matilda (1988). (Full list...)