"Gottlieb was Jewish, and Dahl was openly anti-semitic. The British author didn't respect his editor, and undermined his knowledge of modern art. He was belligerent to him, and his staff, and prone to explosive arguments over money, among other things.
One day in 1981, Dahl, was making increasingly abusive demands about a particular brand of pencil across the Atlantic. Gottlieb, in the US, reached breaking point. So he wrote this perfectly worded letter...
Dahl would go on to work with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who would cautiously turn his twisted, child-inappropriate manuscripts into some of the best-loved works of children's literature (The BFG was originally a paedophile; Matilda not the victim of child neglect, but the cause of parental torture; The Witches "took a lot of abuse)."
This seems to be true of so many beloved figures, that they were rude or frustrating or actively prejudiced in real life.
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