James and the Giant Peach is a popular children's novel written in 1961 by British author Roald Dahl. The original first edition published by Alfred Knopf featured illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. However, there have been various reillustrated versions of it over the years, done 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. The plot centers on a young English orphan boy who enters a gigantic, magical peach, and has a wild and surreal cross-world adventure with six anthropomorphic insects he meets. Originally titled James and the Giant Cherry, Dahl changed it to James and the Giant Peach because a peach is "prettier, bigger and squishier" than a cherry.
Because of the story's occasional macabre and potentially frightening content, it has become a regular target of the censors and is #56 on the American Library Association's top 100 list of most frequently challenged books.
Read more about James And The Giant Peach: Plot, Characters, References in The Book To Other Roald Dahl Works, Film Version
Famous quotes containing the word giant:
“The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn’t ... but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)