William Golding

Introduction

William Golding

Imagine a man who embraced solitude as a child but who became famous for writing about group dynamics. Imagine a man who enjoyed the benefits of a peaceful adolescence, complete with private schooling, but who spent his adult years writing about the inherent violent nature of humans. Imagine a man who was groomed by his parents to be a scientist but who ended up as one of the greatest writers of his time. Imagine William Golding. Raised by educated parents who supported rational thought, Golding used his experiences from World War II to create novels of dark human action. Nothing in Golding’s past suggests that he should become the foremost author of the twentieth century to write about the conflict between barbaric human nature and civil reasoning; his novels, however, continue to entertain and raise those same questions today.

Essential Facts

1. During his five-year military career, Golding was a participant in both the sinking of the great German battleship, the Bismarck, and in the allied invasion of Normandy.
2. Golding’s most famous novel, The Lord of the Flies, was originally titled The Strangers Within and was published twenty-nine years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
3. Lord of the Flies was rejected by twenty-one publishers before acceptance by Faber and Faber.
4. One of Golding’s hobbies was researching and exploring the myth of the Loch Ness monster.
5. Golding was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.

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