Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf in 1964 and in Britain by George Allen & Unwin eleven months later, illustrated by Joseph Schindelman in the first American edition and by Quentin Blake in the British one. Dahl drew the factory's secrecy from his own schooldays near Bournville and York, where Cadbury and Rowntree's sent samples to pupils and spied on one another, an arrangement he later described in his memoir of childhood.

The book is a moral comedy with five contestants. Augustus Gloop eats, Veruca Salt wants, Violet Beauregarde chews, Mike Teavee watches, and Charlie has nothing except patience and a family who need him to do well. Willy Wonka conducts the tour as a series of demonstrations, and each of the other children is removed by the machinery of their own appetite. The Oompa-Loompas who run the factory narrate those removals in verse, and their origin in the book's first edition has been the subject of a long-running revision by the publisher.

Dahl wrote a sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, published in 1972, and planned a third that he never finished. The novel has been filmed twice, as Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in 1971 and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005, and it is regularly listed among the most popular children's books in English. It also carries the author's characteristic argument: that children who are indulged by their parents are being failed by them.