Roald Dahl

1916 – 1990

Literature

Roald Dahl was a British author of popular children's literature and short stories, a poet, screenwriter and a wartime fighter ace. His books have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. He has been called "one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century".

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Contemporaries

Dorothy Hodgkin

Dorothy Hodgkin

Jacques Cousteau

Jacques Cousteau

Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald

Their World

Global Events

1917 Russian Revolution

1918 World War I ends; Spanish flu pandemic begins

1919 Treaty of Versailles signed

1920 League of Nations established

1928 Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin

1929 Wall Street Crash; Great Depression begins

1933 Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany

1936 Spanish Civil War begins

1939 World War II begins

1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor; US enters WWII

1944 D-Day: Allied invasion of Normandy

1945 Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; WWII ends

1945 United Nations founded

1947 India and Pakistan gain independence

1948 State of Israel established

1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted

1949 People's Republic of China proclaimed

1950 Korean War begins

1953 Watson and Crick discover DNA structure

1955 Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

1957 Sputnik launched; Space Age begins

1959 Cuban Revolution; Castro takes power

1961 Berlin Wall constructed

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

1963 Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

1964 Civil Rights Act signed in the United States

1969 Apollo 11: first humans walk on the Moon

1971 Bangladesh Liberation War and independence

1973 1973 oil crisis

1975 Fall of Saigon; Vietnam War ends

1979 Iranian Revolution

1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster

1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall

1989 Tiananmen Square protests

1990 Nelson Mandela released from prison

In Their Field

1922 James Joyce publishes Ulysses

1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes The Great Gatsby

1929 Virginia Woolf publishes A Room of One's Own

1949 George Orwell publishes Nineteen Eighty-Four

1955 Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins literary career

1960 Harper Lee publishes To Kill a Mockingbird

1967 Garcia Marquez publishes One Hundred Years of Solitude

1988 Toni Morrison publishes Beloved