Biography

BIOGRAPHY

1911 - 1993

       William Golding was born in the village of St. Columb Minor in Cornwall. His father was a schoolmaster who was very found of science. Golding started writing when he was seven, but following the wished of his parents he studied natural sciences . Two years later he began to study English literature and philosophy at Brasenose College, Oxford.
     His first book was a collection of poems written in 1934 . In 1939 he moved to Salisbury to teach English at Bishop Wordsworth's School.
    Among the Golding's favorite authors in his childhood are:
Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan of the Apes), Robert Ballantyne (Coral Island), and Jules Verne (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea).
    All these books reflect the ideas of the society before the Second world war because they portray man as a basically good creature who struggles to avoid the evils of society. But all this was before the Second world War when society in general thought that human beings were good in essence, after the war this optimistic point of view changed . William Golding shows   this idea in his book Lord of The Flies because at the end it turns out to be a parody of the kind of books(with the optimistic view of man´s essence)that Golding read in his childhood and that had been a model for him.
     The island setting for Lord of the Flies and the names Ralph, Jack, and Simon were taken from Coral Island. This is a proof that he conciously makes references to Robert Ballantyne´s novel in order to bear comparison before the two works, to shock the reader with the new realistic "version". By doing this he´s questioning the value of Ballantynes novel , making a parody of it or at least showing that society is no longer the same, as if he was saying: " man´s nature is not what we considered it to be".
    This change in his philosophy may be a result of his experience at war( WWII) in which he took active part as a member of the Royal Navy. . Contrary to what he had always thought he started to believe that Human beings were cruel in nature. He was in antisubmarine and antiaircraft operations, and became the commander of a rocket ship, seeing action at D-Day, among other battles.
      Because of the atrocities he witnessed, Golding came to believe that there was a very dark and evil side to man. "The war," he said, "was unlike any other fought in Europe. It taught us not fighting, politics or the follies of nationalism, but about the given nature of man.". From this moment all his works will deal with the dark side of human nature.
      After the war Golding returned to teaching in a boys' school, may be from this experience as a teacher he got to know the nature of children that is so well depicted in Lord of The Flies .
    His novel Lord of the flies was turned down by twenty-one publishes, until it finally appeared in 1954. But it was in the 60´s when it became subject of the critics study. The book became immediate success in Britain and bestseller among American readers in the late 1950s.   The Author and the book has been controversial and still are because there are differing opinions about the quality of the novel and the talent of the author..
     Golding continued to write in spite of the controversy over his work. The criticism encoraged him to continue writing.   After the success and the controversial criticism that Lord of the flies brought him other novels followed: The Inheritors (1955) , Pincher Martin (1956), , and Free Fall (1959) .
Golding resigned in 1961 from teaching and devoted himself entirely to writing. His works from the historical novel THE SPERE (1964) devoloped then in two directions: the metaphysical with the theme of the fall from childlike innocence into guilt, and the social without mythical substructure.
    When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 the author was not widely known though his book had been translated into many languages . In 1988 he was knighted. Golding passed away in 1993.

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NOVELS

Here you will find the summarized plot of his most important novels that wrote from 1954 onwards. He also wrote three previous novels but their quality is quite low and the author himself considered them to be "The rubbish of imitation". You can also see more of his works in Selected Works . These plots provided here are taken from htt p://www.elibrary.com/yahooligans/10044/fetch/flies_03.htm

Lord Of The Flies:

Golding's first novel is more than a boyhood adventure story. The conflicts on the island are the ever present antagonisms of human society. The problems are the problems of the world. The evil thriving in the individual boy is the evil that threatens mankind. Two movements in the novel represent the two forces that govern society. The first is the tendency to orderliness represented in the parliamentary rules of the boys' meetings and in their attempts to build a signal fire. The second is the movement towards chaos as the fire gets out of hand or is forgotten, and as the boys participate in orgies of hunting, primitive dance, and even human sacrifice. The second force is the stronger; without the traditional protection of society, and without superior intellectual guidance the boys swing towards anarchy.

The Inheritors:

The Inheritors is at first glance a mere primitive tale, though clearly based on serious linguistic, psychological, and anthropological research. But it gradually becomes apparent that the primitive story is a mirror for the contemporary age. The problems of the primitive society are contemporary. The struggle for survival by the last of the Neanderthals, as they encounter the more sophisticated tribe with their canoes and sharper weapons, is the situation of modern man confronted by technological advances in weapons and destructive chemicals. Just as Homo sapiens treated the Neanderthal with cruelty, so technology, according to Golding, produces a new potentiality for human cruelty in the modern world. His examination of the roots of personal and racial hatred leads him to suggest that the problem of man's inhumanity to man is not a new one, and that the need for reform is more than governmental; it must take into account the individual's natural proneness to evil.

Pincher Martin:

This is a survival novel dealing with the adventures of a shipwrecked sailor. But the question is not merely one of physical survival, but, more importantly, who is this man Christopher Martin? And what is he worth? Partially, the question is to be answered in terms of his personal characteristics-his toughness and greed. But more significant than these is his blind refusal to admit his guilt. He shuns the lobster that lurks by his island rock. He hates that kind of creature. But with his two claws reaching out to grab whatever soft morsel comes within his reach, he is a lobster. His tragedy is his lack of awareness. Like other Golding characters, he fails to use reason to control the violence in himself, because he does not know himself.

Free Fall:

Golding's fourth novel traces a quest for the meaning of life by a man representative of modern thought. After World War II, taking stock of his life, Samuel Mountjoy focuses on his experience as a war prisoner of the Germans. He knew at the time that he could be persuaded to give up information about his fellow prisoners, and that his nobility or infamy would be a result of circumstance and not choice. A representation of man in the prison of society and self who behaves according to machine-like impulses, he goes back over the history of his life in an attempt to solve the problem of why he acts the way he does. As he pursues the origins of his flawed character, he comes to the realization that the first cause of his fall was not in his poor environment but rather in himself. The first fall was free. And once he wastes the freedom possessed in childhood, his life becomes like the free fall of an object in space. Now that he possesses this knowledge, he recovers a sense of totality that enables him to give direction to his life.
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Copyright 1963-1990 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Selected works: taken form http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wgolding.htm

POEMS, 1934
LORD OF THE FLIES, 1954 - Kärpästen herra - film 1963, dir. by Peter Brook; remake 1990, directed for American tv-savvy kids
INHERITORS, 1955 - Perilliset
PINCHER MARTIN, 1956
THE BRASS BUTTERFLY, 1958 (play)
FREE FALL, 1960 - Vapaa putoaminen
THE ANGLO-SAXON, 1962
THE SPIRE, 1964
THE HOT GATES, 1965
THE PYRAMID, 1967
THE SCORPION GOD, 1971
DARKNESS VISIBLE, 1979 - Näkyvä pimeys
RITES OF PASSAGE, 1980 - Merimatka Booker Prize
A MOVING TARGET, 1982
THE PAPER MEN, 1984 - Paperimiehet
AN EGYPTIAN JOURNAL, 1985
CLOSE QUARTES, 1987
FIRE DOWN BELOW, 1989 - republished under the general title TO THE END OF THE EARTH in 1991

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