William Golding

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

View more Literature & Language videos

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.

Sir William Golding

William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, was born on this date in 1911. The winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize for literature, Golding was working as a teacher in England when he wrote the allegorical novel about a group of boys stranded on an island whose behavior becomes crueler and more barbaric as time passes (1954). Some of his other books include Pincher Martin (1956) and Rites of Passage (1980), winner of the Booker Prize. Queen Elizabeth II knighted Golding in 1988.

Previous:	William Gladstone Steel
Next:	William H. Taft

From our Archives: Today's Highlights, September 19, 2006

Golding, William (Sir William Gerald Golding), 1911-93, English novelist, grad. Oxford (B.A. 1934). Praised for his highly imaginative and original writings, Golding was basically concerned with the realm of ideas, the eternal nature of humanity, and the immaterial, spiritual aspects of the world. In the work that brought him literary fame, the allegorical and, especially with adolescents, extremely popular Lord of the Flies (1954, film 1963), he described the nightmarish adventures of a group of English schoolboys stranded on a deserted island and traced their degeneration from a state of innocence to blood lust and savagery. His later works include The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Spire (1964), The Pyramid (1967), The Scorpion God (1971), Darkness Visible (1979), and a maritime trilogy: Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989). Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983 and was knighted in 1988.

Bibliography

See J. I. Biles, Talk: Conversations with William Golding (1970); biography by J. Carey (2010); studies by H. S. Babb (1970), V. Tiger (1974), J. I. Biles and R. O. Evans, ed. (1978), A. Johnston (1980), J. Briggs. ed. (1985), N. Page, ed. (1985), P. Redpath (1986), B. F. Dick (rev. ed. 1987), J. R. Baker, ed. (1988), S. J. Boyd (1988), J. Cary (1989), K. McCarron (1994 and 1995), H. Bloom, ed. (1996, repr. 2010), A. Hollinger (2000), I. Gregor and M. Kinkead-Weekes (rev. ed. 2002), and Y. Sugimura (2008).

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

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)