He also had a successful parallel career as the writer of macabre adult short stories, usually with a dark sense of humour and a surprise ending. Dahl went on to create some of the best-loved children's stories of the 20th century, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach. The book was commissioned by Walt Disney for a film that was never made, and published in 1943. His first children's book was The Gremlins, about mischievous little creatures that were part of RAF folklore. Its title was inspired by a highly inaccurate and sensationalized article about the crash that blinded him, which claimed he had been shot down instead of simply having to land because of low fuel. The story, about his wartime adventures, was bought by the Saturday Evening Post for $900, and propelled him into a career as a writer.

Today the story is published as A Piece of Cake. Nowadays most editions are illustrated by Quentin Blake (see picture on the left) whose style is rather different from Chaffin’s.īut Wes Anderson – claiming that “Fox” was the first book he owned – is very fond of Chaffin’s original illustrations and thus invited him to work on the production design.Īs you can see in these 1970 illustrations, Chaffin and Anderson share a lot of stylistic preferences such as made-to-measure suits, central perspective, axially symmetrical compositions and cross-section views:Īccording to Wikipedia, this is the first edition cover (but it might as well be the one from 1978).Roald Dahl was a British novelist, short story writer and screenwriter of Norwegian descent, who rose to prominence in the 1940's with works for both children and adults, and became one of the world's bestselling authors.ĭahl's first published work, inspired by a meeting with C. Fox” came out in 1970 with Illustrations by Donald Chaffin. Roald Dahl’s children’s book “Fantastic Mr. Please take a minute to answer the two questions on the right. Since I don’t know too much about my readers, I’m curious how many of you have actually seen Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) finally showed up on a few Swiss cinema screens (on Bluray, as there are no digital or 35mm prints available) I’ve been heavily digging into the works of Wes Anderson lately.

Fantastic mr fox quentin blake