William Golding

Born William Gerald Golding on September 19, 1911, in St Columb Minor, Cornwall, and raised in Marlborough, Wiltshire, in a fourteenth-century house next to a graveyard. His father, Alec, was a schoolmaster with a passion for rationalist science; his mother, Mildred, was a suffragette. Golding studied natural sciences and then English literature at Brasenose College, Oxford, publishing a volume of poems in 1934 that he later disowned. He taught English and philosophy at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury, a post he held, with interruptions, for decades. During World War II he served in the Royal Navy, commanding a rocket-launching craft, participating in the pursuit of the Bismarck, and taking part in the D-Day landings at Normandy , experiences that left him with a bleak view of human nature. “I began to see what people were capable of doing,” he later said. Lord of the Flies (1954), the story of schoolboys marooned on an island who descend into savagery, was rejected by twenty-one publishers before Faber & Faber accepted it; the forty-three-year-old schoolmaster became, almost overnight, one of the most widely read novelists in the English language. The Inheritors (1955), an extraordinary reimagining of Neanderthal consciousness, and Pincher Martin (1956) followed in quick succession. Rites of Passage (1980), the first volume of his sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, won the Booker Prize. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983 and knighted in 1988. Golding died of heart failure on June 19, 1993, at his home in Perranarworthal, Cornwall. He was eighty-one.