William Golding

Sir William Gerald Golding (19 September 1911 19 June 1993) was a British
novelist, poet and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate best known for his novel Lord of the
Flies. He was also awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980, for his novel Rites of
Passage, the first book of the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth.
During World War II, Golding fought in the Royal Navy and was briefly involved in the
pursuit of Germany's mightiest battleship, the Bismarck. He also participated in the invasion
of Normandy on D-Day, commanding a landing ship that fired salvoes of rockets onto the
beaches, and then in a naval action at Walcheren in which 23 out of 24 assault crafts were
sunk. At the war's end he returned to teaching and writing.
In 1985 Golding and his wife moved to Perranarworthal, near Truro, Cornwall, where
he died of heart failure on June 19, 1993. He was buried in the village churchyard at
Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, England. He left the draft of a novel, The Double Tongue, set in
Ancient Delphi, which was published posthumously.
Writing success
In September 1953 Golding sent the typescript of a book to Faber & Faber of London.
Initially rejected by a reader there, the book was championed by Charles Monteith, then a
new editor at the firm. He asked for various cuts in the text and the novel was published in
September 1954 as Lord of the Flies. It was shortly followed by other novels, including The
Inheritors, Pincher Martin, and Free Fall.
Publishing success made it possible for Golding to resign his teaching post at Bishop
Wordsworth's School in 1961, and he spent that academic year as writer-in-residence at
Hollins College near Roanoke, Virginia. Having moved in 1958 from Salisbury to nearby
Bowerchalke, he met his fellow villager and walking companion James Lovelock. The two
discussed Lovelock's hypothesis that the living matter of the planet Earth functions like a
single organism, and Golding suggested naming this hypothesis after Gaia, the goddess of
the earth in Greek mythology.
In 1970 Golding was a candidate for the Chancellorship of the University of Kent at
Canterbury, but lost to Jo Grimond. Golding won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in
1979, the Booker Prize in 1980, and in 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.
Fiction
Golding's often allegorical fiction makes broad use of allusions to classical literature,
mythology, and Christian symbolism. No distinct thread unites his novels, and the subject
matter and technique vary. However his novels are often set in closed communities such as
islands, villages, monasteries, groups of hunter-gatherers, ships at sea or a pharaoh's court.
His first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954; film, 1963 and 1990, play, adapted by Nigel Williams,
1995), dealt with an unsuccessful struggle against barbarism and war, thus showing the
ambiguity and fragility of civilization. It has also been said that it is allegorical of World War II.
The Inheritors (1955) looked back into prehistory, advancing the thesis that humankind's
evolutionary ancestors, "the new people" (generally identified with homo sapiens sapiens),
triumphed over a gentler race (generally identified with Neanderthals) as much by violence
and deceit as by natural superiority. 'The Spire' 1964 follows the building (and near collapse)
of a huge spire onto a medieval abbey church, the church and the spire itself act as a potent
symbols both of the abbot's highest spiritual aspirations and of his worldly vanities. Pincher
Martin his 1954 novel concerns the last moments of a sailor thrown into the north Atlantic
after his ship is attacked. The structure is echoed by that of the later Booker Prize winner by
Yann Martel, Life of Pi. The 1967 novel The Pyramid comprises three separate stories linked
by a common setting (a small English town in the 1920s) and narrator. The Scorpion God
(1971) is a volume of three short novels set in a prehistoric African hunter-gatherer band
('Clonk, Clonk'), an ancient Egyptian court ('The Scorpion God') and the court of a roman
emperor ('Envoy Extraordinary'). The last of these is a reworking of his 1958 play The Brass
Butterfly.
Golding's later novels include Darkness Visible (1979), The Paper Men (1984), and the
comic-historical sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth (BBC TV 2005), comprising the Booker
Prize-winning Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989).
Lord Of The Flies
The key idea that William Golding focuses on in The Lord of the Flies is when removed
from civilised society, people will devolve and return back to being primitive creatures.
Golding portrays this idea throughout the whole book by using different characters. The book
is about a group of boys who are stranded on a tropical island without any adults. At first
they seem very excited about the situation and votes for one of the boys, Ralph, as a leader.
Another one of the boys, Jack, leaves the group to form his own tribe who become more and
more violent and obsessed with hunting pigs and the so-called beast, that they believe lives
on the island. At the end of the book, they try to kill Ralph before all being rescued by a naval
officer. The title of the book comes from Simon, who is described by the others as batty and
shy, imagines that the dead pigs head is talking to him. The pigs head is surrounded by
flies, so Simon calls it the Lord of the Flies. Ralph, the main character in the story, is a fair
and decent boy, he is the only boy who will listen to Piggy. Piggy is an overweight boy who is
made fun of by everyone else for being fat and because he wears glasses and suffers from
asthma, even though smarter than the rest of the boys. Ralph continually stressed to them
the importance of making a signal fire on top of the mountain, so that ships would see the
smoke and come to rescue them. He tells the boys, The fire is the most important thing on
the island. How can we ever be rescued except by luck, if we dont keep a fire going? The
rest of the boys became more savage and were more interested in hunting than keeping the
fire going.. Eventually even Ralph and Piggy became savage, if only for a moment. When
Simon crawled out from the forest in the dark, the boys thought he was the beast and Ralph
and Piggy joined in as they beat him to death with their bare hands. Out of all of the boys the
one who changed the most on the island was Jack. He was head boy in his choir, who soon
became the hunters, and he was more persistent than Ralph in his desire to become the
chief, saying I ought to be chief, because Im chapter chorister and head boy. Jack also has
an unpleasant personality, expressed when saying Shut up, Fatty. to Piggy. Jack showed
his savageness very early on and developed into an even darker personality. while Jack was
first unable to kill a pig, because of the knife cutting into living flesh. He later began to even
enjoy the hunting of the pigs with a spear, and was not at all upset by the deaths of other
boys. When Piggy falls to his death after being knocked off a cliff, Jack screams Thats what
youll get! I meant that! In the end everyone but Simon, and Piggy, who was killed by Jacks
tribe, were lured to join them either by the knowledge that the hunters would provide them
with meat, or were tortured and bullied into joining them. The boys are rescued by a British
navy officer, he is shocked that these are British boys that have ended up as savages. If
British boys, especially ones as civilized as these, could turn into wild savages then anyone
could. The naval officer emphasizes this, saying I should have thought that a pack of British
boys - youre all British arent you? - would have been able to put up a better show than
that.