Mark West

Because that's Dahl's legacy, right?

As fascinating as Dahl's life was, as successful as the film and TV adaptations have been, and as much ink has been spilled on the charges of anti-Semitism, if people are still thinking about Roald Dahl 100 years from now, it will be because of the books.

Mark is one of the world's experts on this subject.

I asked him to start off by talking a little bit about how exactly Dahl changed the landscape of children's literature.

Creating adversarial relationships is, of course, a major theme in Dahl's personal life, too.

Mark actually got to spend some time with Dahl not long before Dahl's death.

He asked Dahl about paving the way for the explosion of children's lit that came in his wake.

But of course, very few other children's authors ever achieved anything close to Dahl's commercial or critical success.

When The Guardian came out with its list of the 100 best novels ever, not children's novels, just novels, Dahl's The BFG came in at number 88, only a little bit behind classics by Saul Bellow and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I asked Mark how Dahl's work evolved over time, and especially how his characters changed.

Mark and I also talked about the charges of bigotry against Dahl and what some have described as Dahl's volatile personality.

Mark says Dahl was equally volatile in his work.

Dahl's complexity is mirrored in the complex characters he created, especially in his adult fiction.

Jesse Stern is a big ol' fan of Dahl's books for adults, especially Dahl's 1979 novel, My Uncle Oswald.

I asked Jesse to tell us why.

One of Dahl's adult stories that I love is The Great Automatic Grammatizator from 1953.

In the London Review of Books, Colin Burrow summarizes the plot.

A couple of jaded men design a computerized writing machine with the aim of cornering the market in magazine short stories.

All the author has to do is press a button.

Historical, satirical, philosophical, political, romantic, erotic, humorous, or straight, and choose a style.