I ended up liking this book more than I thought I would. At the beginning I was turned off by Treglown's initial claims that Dahl was a quarrelsome bully, liar, and plagiarist. These harsh criticisms of a favorite author forced me to read the first few chapters with an equally critical eye, much of the time feeling loyalty to Dahl. It didn't help that Treglown's first couple of chapters were a bit sloppy. When discussing Dahl's family tree there is a lot of pronoun confusion (is "he" Roald or Roald's father?) and confusing jumps in time. By the middle of the book, this evens out and the narrative flows ahead. By the end, the biography was a more nuanced account of Dahl's life than I thought it would be. He is described as a flawed, but strong man, who faced much tragedy, and while his reactions may not have been agreeable, he had an impact on everyone around him. Knowing that many of his stories were "super-edited" by various editors didn't detract from them for me, because now knowing more about Dahl's character, it is clear that no matter where the plots turned, the stories were certainly infused with his own imagination.
What do You think about Roald Dahl: A Biography (1995)?
