Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at 50

llustration by Quentin Blake

•  Lucy Mangan 
• The Guardian, Saturday 30 August 2014

In many ways, the most astonishing thing about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – a bestseller since it was first published 50 years ago, beloved of generations of children, multiply adapted for stage and screen and a furnisher of images and phrases that have entered the cultural lexicon forevermore – is that it ever got written at all.

At the end of the 1950s, Roald Dahl was riding high. He had had a "good" war, as first a flying ace and then an intelligence agent in Washington funnelling information back to MI6, and was leading a glamorous life in the US as a successful writer of dark short stories for adults and the husband of the film star Patricia Neal. By 1957, he had started making up bedtime stories for the first two of the couple's five children, Olivia and Tessa. One of the tales was about a small boy who lived near an enormous chocolate factory – inspired, perhaps, by the one flattened by the eponymous fruit in James and the Giant Peach, his first book for children, which he had just finished and which would be published in 1961. More . . . 

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