William Gerald Golding is considered one of the most distinguished twentieth century British novelists. His first novel, Lord of the Flies, has not only been canonized by school curricula but also entered mythology. Golding was born in a small village in rural southwest England to Alex and Mildred Golding. He was educated at an academically sound but unprestigious state-funded grammar school and at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. After graduation in 1935 and a brief spell as a writer, actor, and producer with small theater companies (experience evident in the tight plotting of his novels and his choice of dramatic situations), Golding became a master at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in the cathedral town of Salisbury; this appointment contributed toward the strong sense of place evoked in his novel The Spire. He married Ann Brookfield in 1939 and the following year joined the Royal Navy, where he saw such action as the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck and commanding a rocket-launching craft during the Allied invasion of France; these experiences infuse the novel Pincher Martin. After World War II ended, Golding returned to teaching, and he remained a teacher until 1960.
No one could have suspected in 1954 that the intensely private author of Lord of the Flies would come to occupy a central place in British culture. This first novel was initially regarded as little more than an exciting but darkly unpleasant adventure story of a group of schoolboys stranded on a desert island, who degenerate into savagery under a “dictator.” Yet the novel’s cultural roots go deep. It turns upside down the world of R. M. Ballantyne’s children’s classic The Coral Island (1857) and subverts the essential optimism of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to create a modern myth that unfolds with swift and brutal inevitability. In addition to having the pent-up energy of a long-meditated work, Lord of the Flies shows a grasp of telling detail that bespeaks the author’s...
(The entire section is 844 words.)