Lucky Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl was a 26 year old veteran of World War 2 when he was invalided home, then sent to Washington DC, as an Assistant Air Attaché.  Roald found himself with a lot of spare time, and equal amount of boredom, when he met C. S. Forester, author of the Horatio Hornblower tales.

Forester was writing articles about Britain for American papers and magazines, and he’d heard that Roald Dahl had had some very scary adventures while in the RAF.  Forester took Roald Dahl out to lunch, hoping for the information for a good written piece.

Lunch was a success with Dahl full of true-life adventure memories, but Forester found taking notes while enjoying his meal and Roald’s company too difficult and asked Dahl to write out a series of notes about his war experiences.

Roald Dahl found writing easy and cathartic and spent five hours writing about his experiences.  He sent the finished article to Forester.

One week later, Dahl received a letter from Forester informing him that Roald’s article had been sent, untouched, to the Saturday Evening Post.  It had been immediately accepted.  Roald Dahl received $1,000. 

In the 1940’s $1,000 was a lot of money, and Dahl realised he had found a profitable profession that he thoroughly enjoyed.  It seems that the name of his initial article was a prophesy for his writing career.  It was called “A Piece of Cake”.
 

Luck, you’ve got to be lucky.
I’m convinced you are born with it,
though it’s latent with many people for a long time.
Roald Dahl

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