William Golding

William Golding (born September 19, 1911, Newquay, Cornwall, England—died June 19, 1993, Perranarworthal, near Falmouth, Cornwall) was an English novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 for his parables of the human condition. An especially popular author among the youth of the post-World War II generation, Golding is best known for his classic novel Lord of the Flies (1954).

Early life and education

Like the fiction of many writers, Golding’s work was shaped by his upbringing and early life experiences. He was born in his grandparents’ home in Newquay, Cornwall. Shortly afterward his family moved to Marlborough, Wiltshire, although he and his elder brother often returned to Cornwall for holidays. His childhood memories there included visiting the local beaches and witnessing the ravages of World War I as the victims of German U-boat attacks on British ships washed ashore.

He was educated at Marlborough Grammar School, where his father, Alec Golding, taught science. As a child he was unpopular with his schoolmates and frequently got into fights, a situation that led his mother, Mildred (née Curnoe) Golding, to speak to the school’s principal. A suffragette and the daughter of a mining engineer, his mother entertained her sons by telling them Cornish ghost stories.

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In 1930 Golding entered Brasenose College, Oxford, where he studied science. He was unhappy with both his choice of studies (a concession to his father’s wishes) and his social status at Brasenose, as he was the only student there who had not previously attended a more elite public school. Eventually, he switched to English, and he graduated in 1935. Two years later he returned to Brasenose to earn a diploma in education.

Marriage and World War II

Golding published his first book, Poems, in 1934, but it attracted little attention; it was his only book of poetry. After working in a settlement house and in small theater companies, he became a schoolmaster at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, Salisbury. In the meantime he became engaged to Mollie Evans, one of his classmates at Marlborough Grammar School. In 1938, however, he met the striking Ann Brookfield. Although they married a year later, and they would have a long union and two children, Golding’s sudden breakup with Evans haunted him. He would return to those events in his fiction.

With the eruption of World War II, Golding joined the Royal Navy in 1940, took part in the action that saw the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck, and commanded a rocket-launching craft during the invasion of France and the D-Day landings in 1944. After the war he resumed teaching at Bishop Wordsworth’s until 1961. His experiences as a teacher and interactions with his students would soon lend themselves to the writing of the book that made his name.

Lord of the Flies and other novels

Golding’s first published novel was Lord of the Flies, the story of a group of schoolboys isolated on a coral island who revert to savagery. The book was rejected by at least nine publishers before it was accepted by Faber & Faber. (Among the titles that were floated for the novel were Strangers from Within, Nightmare Island, and Let’s Play Islands; its final title was chosen based on a key episode in the story.) Yet its imaginative and brutal depiction of the rapid and inevitable dissolution of social mores guaranteed that the novel would become one of the most provocative works of modern British literature and ensure its place as a perennial reading assignment in school curricula. In time, however, Golding came to consider his debut “boring and crude.”

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His next book, the elegiac novel The Inheritors (1955), is set in the last days of the Neanderthals and is another story of the essential violence and depravity of human nature. The guilt-filled reflections of a naval officer, his ship torpedoed, who faces an agonizing death are the subject of Pincher Martin (1956). Two other novels, Free Fall (1959) and The Spire (1964), also demonstrate Golding’s belief that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.” Free Fall contained some of his most personally inspired writing. Published a year after his father’s death, it includes scenes based on Alec Golding’s final days, William’s experience in World War II and his childhood in Marlborough, and his relationship with Mollie Evans and meeting Ann Brookfield. The plot of The Spire, a historical novel set in the 14th century, sprung from Golding’s fascination with Salisbury Cathedral in Wiltshire; it follows a man who becomes convinced that God has directed him to construct a towering spire for a cathedral built on a swamp.

In 1967 Golding published The Pyramid, another semi-autobiographical novel inspired by his youth in Marlborough, followed by The Scorpion God, a collection of three novellas, in 1971. He then succumbed to a long period of writer’s block, exacerbated by heavy drinking, and at last reemerged with Darkness Visible (1979), which tells the story of a boy horribly burned in the London Blitz during World War II. The novel received the James Tait Black Prize. His later works include the Sea trilogy, comprising Rites of Passage (1980), which won the Booker Prize, and its sequels, Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989).

The Nobel Prize

Success brought Golding a devoted readership and the Nobel Prize in 1983. He was cited by the Nobel Committee “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.” In his Nobel lecture Golding addressed his literary reputation as a pessimist by remarking, “Critics have dug into my books until they could come up with something that looked hopeless. I can’t think why. I don’t feel hopeless myself. Indeed I tried to reverse the process by explaining myself. Under some critical interrogation I named myself a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist.”

But fame intruded on his privacy. His life in Wiltshire became unbearable as curiosity seekers frequently waited outside his home for a look at the esteemed writer. In 1985 Golding and his wife moved to Cornwall, where he spent the rest of his life. Golding was knighted in 1988.

Death and posthumous work

Golding died of heart failure at age 81. He was buried in Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, and memorialized at a service at Salisbury Cathedral that included poet Ted Hughes reading passages from The Inheritors. Golding’s final novel, The Double Tongue, was posthumously published in 1995.