Roald Dahl - James and the Giant Peach - 1961

"James and the Giant Peach" by Roald Dahl, and ill. by Nancy Ekholm Burkert - Alfred. A Knopf, 1961 first American edition, second issue (with four-line Book Press colophon and original unclipped $3.95 dust jacket) - 20cmx15cm - condition: book in good condition, with all ill. present, some rubbing, in original price unclipped dustwrapper with some wear to edges.

James and the Giant Peach is a children's novel written in 1961 by British author Roald Dahl. The first edition, published by Alfred Knopf, featured illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. There have been re-illustrated versions of it over the years, drawn by Michael Simeon (for the first British edition), Emma Chichester Clark, Lane Smith and Quentin Blake. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1996 (with Smith being a conceptual designer) which was directed by Henry Selick, and a musical in 2010.

The plot centres on an orphan boy who enters a gigantic, magical peach, and has a wild and surreal adventure with seven magically altered garden bugs he meets. Dahl was going to write about a giant cherry, but changed it to James and the Giant Peach because a peach is "prettier, bigger and squishier than a cherry".[1][2] Because of the story's occasional macabre and potentially frightening content, it has become a regular target of censors.[3][4]

Dahl dedicated the book to his six-year-old daughter Olivia, and four-year-old daughter Tessa[a]; Olivia died from measles only a year after the book was published.[5]

American novelist Bret Easton Ellis cites James and the Giant Peach as his favourite children's book:

It changed my life. My aunt read it to me, my sisters and my three cousins in two sittings over vacation at a beach house when I was about six. The idea that the world was meaner, crueller, more absurd and fantastical than anything that picture books had previously showed me made a real impact. That was the moment I couldn’t go back [as a reader]