BIOGRAPHY
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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 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, 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. In 1983, Golding
received the Nobel Prize for literature for his novels which, according to
the Nobel committee, "with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art
and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in
the world of today." 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 focused on the fall of Hellenic culture and the rise of
Roman civilization. This work was published posthumously in 1995.
ClassicNotes on Works by William Golding
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