Unknown (main narrator, possibly Aaron Tracy)
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
He knocks on the office door of Alfred Knopf and waits.
Finally, the door is pulled open and Dahl hands over his manuscript, knowing it's either his salvation or the final nail in his coffin.
Knopf doesn't fall in love with Dahl's manuscript.
No one writes kids' books like this one.
It's filled with really dark themes and a subversive tone, while most kids' books of the early 1960s have more wholesome, sanitized narratives.
Dahl has incorporated real childhood fears of abandonment, abuse, and loneliness.
The plot revolves around an orphan living with his horrible aunts and has some really surreal touches.
But Knopf is at least a little taken with the sheer breadth of imagination in the story.
They'll publish in America first, since that's where Dahl is living.
The first printing comes out in July 1961, and almost no one buys it.
Roald Dahl's first stab at a children's book sells just 2,600 copies in its entire first year.
But remember, this is Roald Dahl, the same man who was told his son needed a medical tube that didn't exist, so he invented one.
The same man who willed his wife back to health after her strokes when the doctors said it was impossible.
He is not a man who accepts defeat.
Which is why it's so out of character that for the next few years, Roald Dahl is about the least successful writer of children's books of any author at any of the major publishing houses.