Leopards Ate My Face

I loved the stories too for the most part. But we grow and there's some real shit to be reckoned with...

• He cheated on his wife, had a years-long affair that would eventually end their marriage with a friend of hers.

• He was an admitted anti-Semite. In 1983, he announced in the New Statesman that Hitler had his reasons for exterminating six million men, women and children. "There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity," he said. "I mean, there's always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason." In the August 1983 edition of the British periodical Literary Review, Dahl wrote, in reference to Jewish people, “Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.” He made reference to “those powerful American Jewish bankers” and asserted that the United States government was “utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions over there.” A few months before his death in 1990, Dahl stated outright that he was anti-Semitic in an interview with The Independent.

• The British Royal Mint officially decided against issuing a commemorative coin to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth, noting that Dahl was "associated with anti-Semitism and not regarded as an author of the highest reputation"

• After his death, the Dahl family issued a public apology for the hurt caused by his anti-Semitic statements. Dahl’s family “apologized unreservedly for the hurt and suffering" caused by Dahl and said, "Those prejudiced statements are in marked contrast to the values of kindness and inclusivity at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories.”

• Dahl’s children’s books aren’t considered notably anti-Semitic. However, his publishers—especially longtime editor Stephen Roxburgh—are credited with cutting racist and misogynistic content from some of his most famous stories, including The Witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG. For example, Dahl’s original portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas depicted them as African pygmies that Willy Wonka shipped to England “in large packing cases with holes in them,” Wonka explains that he found the Oompa-Loompas ‘in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before.’ They were near starvation, living on vile caterpillars, so Wonka smuggled them to England for their own good,” The NAACP began protesting this depiction of the Oompa-Loompas, Dahl was apparently reluctant to rewrite the characters. But he did eventually revise the book, reimagining the Oompa-Loompas as “long-haired, rosy-cheeked, and white, hailing from the island of Loompaland.”