William Golding
Sir
William Gerald Golding was born in 1911 in Saint
Columb Minor in Cornwall, England, to Alec Golding, a socialist teacher who
supported scientific rationalism, and Mildred Golding (née Curnroe), a supporter
of female suffrage. As a child, William Golding was educated at the Marlborough
Grammar School, where his father worked, and later at Brasenose College, Oxford.
Although educated to be a scientist at the request of his father, the young
Golding developed an interest in literature, becoming devoted first to
Anglo-Saxon texts and then to poetry, which he wrote avidly. At Oxford he
studied natural science for two years and then transfered to a program for
English literature and philosophy. Following a short period of time in which he
worked in various positions 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,
after which he returned to Bishop Wordsworth's School, where he taught until the
early 1960s.
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 became a surprise success.
E.M. Forster declared Lord of the Flies the outstanding novel of its year, while Time
and Tidecalled 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, IThe 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 deals
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.
In addition to
his novels and his early collection of poems, Golding 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
works 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.