Boy | Boy

At a glance:

Author: Roald Dahl
First Published: 1984
Time of Work: 1820–1936
Setting: Norway, France, Wales, England, and East Africa
Principal Characters: Roald Dahl, Harald Dahl, Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg Dahl, Thwaites, Mrs. Pratchett, Mr. Coombes, Captain Hardcastle
Genres: Nonfiction, Autobiography
Subjects: Maturation or coming of age, Memory, Authors or writers, Autobiography, Schools or school life, England or English people, Storytelling, Amputation, amputees, or prosthetics
Locales: Africa, France, England, Wales, Norway

In a prefatory note to Boy: Tales of Childhood, Roald Dahl asserts that “an autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details. This is not an autobiography.” He thus immediately presents his intention to the reader: not to bore. Rather, eschewing standard autobiographical procedure, Dahl offers a series of childhood tales recounting events that “made such a tremendous impression on me that I have never been able to get them out of my mind.” Boy is less an autobiography than a...

Boy | Boy

At a glance:

Form and Content

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