William Golding

Biography

William Golding (1911-1993) spent the Second World War commanding a rocket-launch vessel in the Royal Navy, participating in the D-Day landings and the sinking of the Bismarck. He had seen men kill and be killed at close range. Before the war he had been a schoolteacher, teaching boys. After the war he went back to teaching boys. He wrote Lord of the Flies in 1951 — rejected by 21 publishers before acceptance — out of the conviction, formed by direct experience of what men do to each other, that the comfortable Victorian assumption of innate English civilizedness was a catastrophic lie. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. When asked why he wrote Lord of the Flies, he said: 'The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature.'

William Golding at a glance