Biography of William Golding

Biography of William Golding

Born on September, 19 in 1911 in Cornwall, England, Sir William Gerald Golding lived an isolated life with his parents and nurse in a gloomy house situated next to a graveyard, and the nearness of this burial ground gave rise to a terrifying fear of death and the unknown. The chestnut tree in the garden, however, provided refuge for Golding, and his vocation as a writer began to take shape there as he sat reading or gazing at his surroundings. He was educated at the Marlborough Grammar School, where his father taught, and later at Brasenose College, Oxford. In school, Golding was a "dreamer," not particularly skilled at mathematical studies but fascinated with language and possessed of an active imagination.

Although he tried to write a novel as early as age twelve, his parents urged him to study the natural sciences. E ducated to be a scientist at the wishes of his father, he soon developed a great interest in literature, becoming first devoted to Anglo-Saxon and then writing poetry. At Oxford he studied English literature and philosophy. Following a short period of time in which he worked at a settlement house and in small theater companies as both an actor and a writer, Golding became a schoolmaster at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Navy and was involved in the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck, but following the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth's School, where he taught until the early sixties. Golding’s experience in World War II had a profound effect on his view of humanity and the evils of which it was capable.

Published a volume of poems in 1935.

In 1954, Golding published his first novel, Lord of the Flies, which details the adventures of British schoolboys stranded on an island in the Pacific who descend into barbaric behavior. Although at first rejected by twenty-one different publishing houses, Golding's first novel become a surprise success. E.M. Forster declared Lord of the Flies the outstanding novel of its year, while Time and Tide called it "not only a first-rate adventure story but a parable of our times ". Golding continued to develop similar themes concerning the inherent violence in human nature in his next novel, The Inheritors, published the following year. This novel deals with the last days of Neanderthal man. The Inheritors posits that the Cro-Magnon "fire-builders" triumphed over Neanderthal man as much by violence and deceit as by any natural superiority. His subsequent works include Pincher Martin (1956), the story of a guilt-ridden naval officer who faces an agonizing death, Free Fall (1959), and The Spire (1964), each of which deal with the depravity of human nature. The Spire is an allegory concerning the protagonist's obsessive determination to build a cathedral spire regardless of the consequences.

As well as his novels and his early collection of poems, Golding also published a play entitled " The Brass Butterfly " in 1958 and two collections of essays, The Hot Gates (1965) and A Moving Target (1982).

Golding's final novels include Darkness Visible (1979), the story of a boy horribly injured during the London blitz of World War II, and Rites of Passage (1980). This novel won the Booker McConnell Prize, the most prestigious award for English literature, and inspired two sequels, Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989). These three novels portray life aboard a ship during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1983, Golding received the Nobel Prize for literature "for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today," and in 1988 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Sir William died in 1993 in Perranarworthal, Cornwall. At the time of his death he was working on an unfinished manuscript entitled The Double Tongue, which deals with the fall of Hellenic culture and the rise of Roman civilization. This work was published posthumously in 1995.

Background on Lord of the Flies

The action of Lord of the Flies takes place during World War II on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Golding deliberately borrows the setting from Coral Island (1858) in order to contrast his theme with that of Robert Michael Ballantyne's utopian novel.

Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of English schoolboys marooned on a tropical island after their plane is shot down during a war. Though the novel is fictional, its exploration of the idea of human evil is at least partly based on Golding’s experience with the real-life violence and brutality of World War II. Free from the rules and structures of civilization and society, the boys on the island in Lord of the Flies descend into savagery. As the boys splinter into factions, some behave peacefully and work together to maintain order and achieve common goals, while others rebel and seek only anarchy and violence. In his portrayal of the small world of the island, Golding paints a broader portrait of the fundamental human struggle between the civilizing instinct—the impulse to obey rules, behave morally, and act lawfully—and the savage instinct—the impulse to seek brute power over others, act selfishly, scorn moral rules, and indulge in violence.

Much of the novel is allegorical, meaning that the characters and objects in the novel are infused with symbolic significance that conveys the novel’s central themes and ideas. In portraying the various ways in which the boys on the island adapt to their new surroundings and react to their new freedom, Golding explores the broad spectrum of ways in which humans respond to stress, change, and tension.

Readers and critics have interpreted Lord of the Flies in widely varying ways over the years since its publication. During the 1950s and 1960s, many readings of the novel claimed that Lord of the Flies dramatizes the history of civilization. Some believed that the novel explores fundamental religious issues, such as original sin and the nature of good and evil. Others approached Lord of the Flies through the theories of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who taught that the human mind was the site of a constant battle among different impulses—the id (instinctual needs and desires), the ego (the conscious, rational mind), and the superego (the sense of conscience and morality). Still others maintained that Golding wrote the novel as a criticism of the political and social institutions of the West.

Lord of the Flies is firmly rooted in the sociopolitical concerns of its era. Published during the first decade of the Cold War, the novel contains obvious parallels to the struggle between liberal democracy and totalitarianism. Ralph represents the liberal tradition, while Jack, before he succumbs to total anarchism, can be interpreted as representing military dictatorship. Ultimately, there is some validity to each of these different readings and interpretations of Lord of the Flies. Although Golding’s story is confined to the microcosm of a group of boys, it resounds with implications far beyond the bounds of the small island and explores problems and questions universal to the human experience.

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