William Golding

For more information on Sir William Gerald Golding, visit Britannica.com.

The winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize in literature, Golding is among the most popular and influential British authors to have emerged after World War II.

Golding's reputation rests primarily upon his acclaimed first novel Lord of the Flies (1954), which he described as "an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature." A moral allegory as well as an adventure tale in the tradition of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857), and Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), Lord of the Flies focuses upon a group of British schoolboys marooned on a tropical island. After having organized themselves upon democratic principles, their society degenerates into primeval barbarism. While often the subject of diverse psychological, sociological, and religious interpretations, Lord of the Flies is consistently regarded as an incisive and disturbing portrayal of the fragility of civilization.

Golding was born in St. Columb Minor in Cornwall, England. He enrolled in Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1930, initially intending to obtain a degree in the sciences. After several years of study, however, he decided to devote himself to the study of English literature. He published a volume of poetry, Poems, in 1934 to scant critical notice; he himself later repudiated the work. Receiving a degree in English in 1935, he worked in various theaters in London, and in 1939 he moved to Salisbury, where he was employed as a schoolteacher. He served five years in the Royal Navy during World War II, an experience that likely helped shape his interest in the theme of barbarism and evil within humanity. Following the war Golding continued to teach and to write fiction. In 1954, his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published to much critical acclaim in England. He continued to write novels, as well as essays, lectures, and novellas, throughout the next three decades. Most of these works, however, were overshadowed by the popular and critical success of Lord of the Flies.

Golding's Lord of the Flies presents a central theme of his oeuvre: the conflict between the forces of light and dark within the human soul. Although the novel did not gain popularity in the United States until several years after its original publication, it has now become a modern classic, studied in most high schools and colleges. Set sometime in the near future, Lord of the Flies is about a group of schoolboys abandoned on a desert island during a global war. They attempt to establish a government among themselves, but without the restraints of civilization they quickly revert to savagery. Similar in background and characters to Ballantyne's The Coral Island, Lord of the Flies totally reverses Ballantyne's concept of the purity and innocence of youth and humanity's ability to remain civilized under the worst conditions.

While none of Golding's subsequent works achieved the critical success of Lord of the Flies, he continued to produce novels that elicit widespread critical interpretation. Within the thematic context of exploring the depths of human depravity, the settings of Golding's works range from the prehistoric age, as in The Inheritors, (1955), to the Middle Ages, as in The Spire (1964), to contemporary English society. This wide variety of settings, tones, and structures presents dilemmas to critics attempting to categorize them. Nevertheless, certain stylistic devices are characteristic of his work. One of these, the use of a sudden shift of perspective, has been so dramatically employed by Golding that it both enchants and infuriates critics and readers alike. For example, Pincher Martin (1956) is the story of Christopher Martin, a naval officer who is stranded on a rock in the middle of the ocean after his ship has been torpedoed. The entire book relates Martin's struggles to remain alive against all odds. The reader learns in the last few pages that Martin's death occurred on the second page - a fact that transforms the novel from a struggle for earthly survival into a struggle for eternal salvation.

Golding's novels are often termed fables or myths. They are laden with symbols (usually of a spiritual or religious nature) so imbued with meaning that they can be interpreted on many different levels. The Spire, for example, is perhaps his most polished allegorical novel, equating the erecting of a cathedral spire with the protagonist's conflict between his religious faith and the temptations to which he is exposed. Darkness Visible (1979) continues to illuminate the universal confrontation of Good and Evil; Golding was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for this novel in 1980. Throughout the 1980s Golding's novels, essays, and the travel journal An Egyptian Journal (1985) have received general praise from commentators. Lord of the Flies, however, remains central to Golding's popularity and his international reputation as a major contemporary author.

Further Reading

Allen, Walter, The Modern Novel, Dutton, 1964.

Anderson, David, The Tragic Past, John Knox Press, 1969.

Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 5, Gale, 1991.

Axthelm, Peter M., The Modern Confessional Novel, Yale University Press, 1967.

Babb, Howard S., The Novels of William Golding, Ohio State University Press, 1970.

Baker, James R., William Golding: A Critical Study, St. Martin's, 1965.

Biles, Jack I., Talk: Conversations with William Golding, Harcourt, 1971.

Quotes:

"Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years."

"Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry."

"To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be -- I hope it is -- redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable."

"Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind."

"Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things."

"Childhood is a disease -- a sickness that you grow out of."

See more famous quotes by William Golding

William Golding
Born	19 September 1911(1911-09-19) St. Columb Minor, Cornwall, England, United Kingdom
Died	19 June 1993 (aged 81) Perranarworthal, Cornwall, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	British
Genres	allegory, essay
Notable work(s)	Lord of the Flies
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1983
Influences Jules Verne, John Milton
Influenced Stephen King, Greg F. Gifune, Jyoti Guptara, Suresh Guptara
Signature

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.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Marriage and family 1.3 War service 1.4 Death 2 Career 2.1 Writing success 2.2 Fiction 3 Major works 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Biography

Early life

William Golding was born in his grandmother's house, 47 Mountwise, St Columb Minor, Cornwall^[1] and he spent many childhood holidays there. He grew up at his family home in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father (Alec Golding) was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement). Alec Golding was a socialist with a strong commitment to scientific rationalism, and the young Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended the school where his father taught.^[2] His mother, Mildred, kept house at 29, The Green, Marlborough, and supported the moderate campaigners for female suffrage. In 1930 Golding went to Oxford University as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, where he read Natural Sciences for two years before transferring to English Literature.

Golding's biographer John Carey claimed in 2009 that Golding admits in a diary to attempted rape while he was an undergraduate^[3]. The victim, whose name was Dora, was known to Golding from when she was 13 and he three years older; the attempted rape occurred two years later, when Golding was home from his first year at Oxford.^[3] Following the attempted rape, the pair met again two years later at which point, according to reports, they consummated their relationship.^[3] Carey attests that Golding was ashamed of his relationship with Dora, which he - Golding - considered demonstrative of his own "monstrous"^[3] character. Carey also relates that Dora achieved a form of revenge, by persuading Golding's father to spy on the pair having sex in the open air: "She wanted to show [Alec Golding] that his two sons were not exemplary^[3].

Golding took his B.A. (Hons) Second Class in the summer of 1934, and later that year his first book, Poems, was published in London by Macmillan & Co, through the help of his Oxford friend, the anthroposophist Adam Bittleston. Golding was an avid animal rights activist.

Marriage and family

Golding married Ann Brookfield on 30 September 1939 and they had two children, Judy and David.^[1]

War service

During World War II, Golding fought in the Royal Navy and was briefly involved in the pursuit and sinking 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 craft were sunk.^[4] At the war's end he returned to teaching and writing.^[1]

Death

In 1985 Golding and his wife moved to Tullimaar House at Perranarworthal, near Truro, Cornwall, where he died of heart failure, 8 years later, on 19 June 1993. He was buried in the village churchyard at Bowerchalke, South Wiltshire (near the Hampshire and Dorset county boundaries). He left the draft of a novel, The Double Tongue, set in ancient Delphi, which was published posthumously.^[5][6]

Career

Writing success

In September 1953 Golding sent a manuscript 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 in the United States 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 the politician and leader of the Liberal Party, 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 (unless it be a fundamental pessimism about humanity), 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 an allegory 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 cathedral church (generally assumed to be Salisbury Cathedral); the church and the spire itself act as a potent symbols both of the dean's highest spiritual aspirations and of his worldly vanities. His 1954 novel Pincher Martin 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 novellas 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).

Major works

• Poems (1934)
• Lord of the Flies (1954)
• The Inheritors (1955)
• Pincher Martin (1956)
• The Brass Butterfly (play) (1958)
• Free Fall (1959)
• The Spire (1964)
• The Hot Gates (essays) (1965)
• The Pyramid (1967)
• The Scorpion God (1971)
• Darkness Visible (1979)
• A Moving Target (essays) (1982)
• The Paper Men (1984)
• An Egyptian Journal (1985)
• To the Ends of the Earth (trilogy)
  • Rites of Passage (1980)
  • Close Quarters (1987)
  • Fire Down Below (1989)
• The Double Tongue (posthumous) (1995)^[7]

See also

• Novels by William Golding
• John Carey. William Golding: The Man who Wrote Lord of the Flies. London, Faber & Faber. 2009. ISBN 9780571231638
• John Carey. William Golding: The Man who Wrote Lord of the Flies. New York, Free Press. To be published in the United States by Free Press in June 2010. ISBN 9781439187326

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Kevin McCarron, ‘Golding, Sir William Gerald (1911–1993)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006 accessed 13 Nov 2007
2. ^ (Which should not be confused with Marlborough College, the "public" boarding school).
3. ^ ^{a b c d e} Brooks, Richard (August 16, 2009). "Author William Golding tried to rape girl, 15" (in English). The Times. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6797774.ece. Retrieved 24 October 2009. 
4. ^ Mortimer, John (1986). Character Parts. London: Penguin. ISBN 0-14-008959-4. 
5. ^ Golding, William (1996). The Double Tongue. London: Faber. ISBN 9780571178032. 
6. ^ Bruce Lambert (20 June 1993). "William Golding Is Dead at 81; The Author of 'Lord of the Flies'". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0919.html. Retrieved 2007-09-06. 
7. ^ The Double Tongue 1996 Faber reprint ISBN 9780571177202

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: William Golding

• Golding's Life and work reviewed at the Educational Paperback Association
• Biography of William Golding at the Nobel Prize website
• Interview by Mary Lynn Scott - Universal Pessimist, Cosmic Optimist
• William Golding Ltd Website of Golding family.
• Last Words An account of Golding's last evening by D. M. Thomas - Guardian - Saturday 10 June 2006 (Review Section)
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Kevin McCarron (online edn, May 2006), Golding, Sir William Gerald (1911–1993)

v • d • e William Golding Works Lord of the Flies (1954) · The Inheritors (1955) · Pincher Martin (1956) · Sometime, Never : Three Tales of Imagination (1956) · The Brass Butterfly : a Play in Three Acts (1958)  · Free Fall (1959)  · The Spire (1964) · The Hot Gates, and Other Occasional Pieces (1965) · The Pyramid (1967) · The Scorpion God : Three Short Novels (1971) · Darkness Visible (1979) · Rites of Passage (1980) · A Moving Target (1982) · Nobel Lecture, 7 December 1983 (1984) · The Paper Men (1984) · An Egyptian Journal (1985) · Close Quarters (1987) · Fire Down Below (1989) · The Double Tongue (1995) List of works

v • d • e Man Booker Prize for Fiction 1969–1980 P. H. Newby (1969) · Bernice Rubens (1970) · V. S. Naipaul (1971) · John Berger (1972) · James Gordon Farrell (1973) · Nadine Gordimer / Stanley Middleton (1974) · Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975) · David Storey (1976) · Paul Scott (1977) · Iris Murdoch (1978) · Penelope Fitzgerald (1979) · William Golding (1980) 1981–2000 Salman Rushdie (1981) · Thomas Keneally (1982) · J. M. Coetzee (1983) · Anita Brookner (1984) · Keri Hulme (1985) · Kingsley Amis (1986) · Penelope Lively (1987) · Peter Carey (1988) · Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) · A. S. Byatt (1990) · Ben Okri (1991) · Michael Ondaatje / Barry Unsworth (1992) · Roddy Doyle (1993) · James Kelman (1994) · Pat Barker (1995) · Graham Swift (1996) · Arundhati Roy (1997) · Ian McEwan (1998) · J. M. Coetzee (1999) · Margaret Atwood (2000) 2001–present Peter Carey (2001) · Yann Martel (2002) · DBC Pierre (2003) · Alan Hollinghurst (2004) · John Banville (2005) · Kiran Desai (2006) · Anne Enright (2007) · Aravind Adiga (2008) · Hilary Mantel (2009)

v • d • e Nobel Laureates in Literature Saul Bellow (1976) · Vicente Aleixandre (1977) · Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) · Odysseas Elytis (1979) · Czesław Miłosz (1980) · Elias Canetti (1981) · Gabriel García Márquez (1982) · William Golding (1983) · Jaroslav Seifert (1984) · Claude Simon (1985) · Wole Soyinka (1986) · Joseph Brodsky (1987) · Naguib Mahfouz (1988) · Camilo José Cela (1989) · Octavio Paz (1990) · Nadine Gordimer (1991) · Derek Walcott (1992) · Toni Morrison (1993) · Kenzaburo Oe (1994) · Seamus Heaney (1995) · Wisława Szymborska (1996) · Dario Fo (1997) · José Saramago (1998) · Günter Grass (1999) · Gao Xingjian (2000) Complete roster · 1901–1925 · 1926–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present

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