Golding, Sir William Gerald

▪ 1994

      British novelist (b. Sept. 19, 1911, St. Columb Minor, Cornwall, England—d. June 19, 1993, Perranarworthal, Cornwall), won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Literature for his novel Lord of the Flies (1954; filmed 1963 and 1990) and other works, which, "with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today." Golding was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford (B.A., 1935; M.A., 1961). He published a small volume of poetry in 1934, briefly worked in a settlement house, and became a teacher (1939) at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury. He later said the idea for his best-known work was inspired by his experiences as a schoolmaster and by his service in the Royal Navy during World War II, during which he was witness to the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck and to the Allied landing at Normandy. After the war he returned to teaching and to writing novels. Lord of the Flies, his fourth attempt, was a shattering tale (set in the near future) of English schoolboys marooned on an island during an atomic war. The novel reportedly was rejected by 21 publishers before it finally appeared to lukewarm reviews. A paperback edition released in the U.S. in 1959, however, gained near-cult popularity and a financial success that allowed Golding to quit teaching. In this harrowing parable of good and evil, most of the boys gradually regress into idol worship, tribal savagery, and ritualistic murder—a reflection of the adult world beyond the island and the real world beyond the book, where civilized behaviour is a thin veneer and "man produces evil as a bee produces honey." Golding returned to this theme in later novels, notably The Inheritors (1955), in which the last Neanderthals are destroyed by clever, weapons-wielding Homo sapiens, and The Spire (1964), a tale of vainglory and obsession in a medieval clergyman. Other novels include Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Pyramid (1967), Darkness Visible (1979), and The Paper Men (1984). Rites of Passage (1980) won the Booker Prize and inspired two sequels, Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989). Golding was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1966 and was knighted in 1988.

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