William Golding

William Golding, whose full name is Sir William Gerald Golding, was an English novelist, poet, and playwright awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Literature for his parables of the human condition. He attracted a cult-like following of readers, especially among the post-World War II youth.

William Golding was born on September 19, 1911 in St. Columb Minor, near Newquay, Cornwall, in England. Born to parents Alex and Mildred Golding, William was raised in a 14th-century house next to a graveyard with his older brother Joseph. His father worked as a schoolmaster, and his mother Mildred was an active suffragette, fighting for women's right to vote.

Photo of William Golding's childhood home.

Golding's early education was at the school his father ran, Marlborough Grammar School. Here, when he was about twelve years old, Golding attempted, unsuccessfully, to write his first novel. He was known, further, to enjoy reading as a child, with some of his favorite novelists including Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Golding has also been characterized as a frustrated child, who found an outlet for that frustration in bullying his peers. He would later describe himself as a selfish and bratty child, going so far as to say he enjoyed hurting people.

Upon completing primary school, Golding attended Brasenose College at Oxford University, where he was initially studying science, with his father hoping he would become a scientist. After two years at Oxford, Golding switched to studying English literature, eventually earning a bachelor's degree in that subject in 1934. He was also said to have been uncomfortable at Oxford as the only student in his class to have attended grammar school (the equivalent of public school in England).

The Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury.

In the same year he graduated, Golding published his first piece of writing. The collection of poetry, aptly titled Poems was published by Macmillan & Co., London, with help from a friend from Oxford Adam Bittleston. The collection was largely ignored by critics. For a short period following his graduation, Golding worked at a settlement house and in theater companies, where he was able to explore life as an actor and a writer before he took a position as a teacher of English and philosophy at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury in 1935.

William Golding in uniform.

Despite his early enjoyment of teaching, in 1940 Golding abandoned the profession to join the Royal Navy and fight in the Second World War. Golding spent the better part of the next six years on a naval ship, except for a seven-month stint he spent in New York where he assisted Lord Cherwell at the Naval Research establishment. While in the Royal Navy, Golding developed a lifelong romance with sailing in the sea. He also participated in the sinking of the Bismarck, and amongst the battles his ship took part in were skirmishes with submarines, planes, and other battleships. Lieutenant Golding was even placed in command of a rocket-launching craft.

His World War Two experiences, much like later experiences teaching, would prove to be fruitful material for his fiction, and in 1945, at the conclusion of the war, Golding returned to teaching and writing. Of those experiences, Golding would later say:

I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

William Golding's work has been described by some as pessimistic, mythical, and spiritual. The work of an allegorist who used novels to explore the constant struggle between civilized man and his hidden, darker nature. The author would have a career as both a college campus cult favorite and one of the 20th century's distinctive, and debated, literary talents. The appeal of Golding and his work was perhaps summarized best by the Nobel Prize committee:

[His] books are very entertaining and exciting. They can be read with pleasure and profit without the need to make much effort with learning or acumen. But they have also aroused an unusually great interest in professional literary critics [who find] deep strata of ambiguity and complication in Golding's work... in which odd people are tempted to reach beyond their limits, thereby being bared to the very marrow.

William Golding's writing style has been typified by the use of classical literature, Christian symbolism, and mythology, with all of his novels being considered distinct from each other. There is no common plot or story to all of his novels, but all of them are set on villages and islands, courts, and monasteries—mostly closed settings. His writing was honored with awards such as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1979, the Man Booker Prize in 1980, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was also awarded the title of "Sir" by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988. The Times included him in the list of "The 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945".

Original jacket for Golding's Lord of the Flies.

Golding began writing early drafts of the novel that would become Lord of the Flies in the early 1950s, giving it the original title Strangers from Within. It was rejected more than twenty times when he sought to publish it, with publishers finding the book to be too abstract and symbolic. A reader at the publishing house of Faber & Faber called the manuscript "absurd and uninteresting fantasy... rubbish and dull. Pointless" but a young editor read the manuscript and believed it had potential. He pushed Golding to retitle the work, which finally followed a suggestion from a fellow editor: Lord of the Flies.

The tale of the schoolboys stranded on an island during their escape from the war received mixed reviews and experienced modest sales in its hardcover edition. However, the novel began to garner a reputation, especially in academic circles, and sales began to build. The novel is recognized as in important literary work of the modern since, with its exploration of human nature, its ripe symbolism, and terrifyingly effective glimpse into what a society driven by primal urges and the need for security would look like, which continue to echo.

In 1959 the paperback edition of the novel was published, the book was made more accessible and teachers, aware of the student interest in the book, began assigning the work in their literature class, further growing the novel's reputation. This in turn drew critics, who reacted to the work with scholarly reviews of what had previously been deemed an adventure story.

The novel has been compared to works such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Richard Hughes's A Wind in Jamaica; Golding's novel is closer to the author's "answer" to the 19th-century writer R.M. Ballantyne's children's classic The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean. These two books share the same basic plot line and even some character names, although the similarity ends there. It has also been suggested the novel drew on psychological experiments Golding undertook with his students at Bishop Wordsworth's School. One of these experiments including dividing his pupils into gangs with one attacking a camp and the others defending that camp. Some have suggested such exercises gave rise to the characters of the book.

The book has also been adapted twice into film. The first adaption undertaken in the 1960s by Peter Brook, and the second undertaken in 1990. Both films, much like their source material, were critically acclaimed.

With his debut novel published, Golding continued to write more novels, following The Lord of the Flies with The Inheritors, published in 1955, and set in prehistoric times detailing the destruction of the last remaining tribe of Neanderthals at the hands of the encroaching, dominant Homo sapiens. Written from the simplistic and impressionistic view of the Neanderthals, the book is more experimental than Lord of the Flies while exploring similar themes.

Cover for Pincher Martin.

In 1956, Golding published Pincher Martin, a tale of a naval officer who survives the sinking of his ship and washes up on a remote island. On the island, the officers training and intelligence allow him to survive, until his reality begins to crumble and terrifying visions cause the officer to doubt his existence.

Golding followed this with the 1959 publication of Free Fall, a novel of an officer in a prisoner of war camp during World War II. Placed into solitary confinement and with the scheduled threat of torture coming for knowledge of an escape attempt, the book watches the officers fear and anxiety erode him while he reviews his life and wonders at his coming fate, breaking before the torture commences.

First edition cover of the Spire.

Despite his enjoyment of teaching, in 1962 Golding's book sales and literary fame were enough for him to quit his position and begin writing full time. Although he would never again achieve the impact of Lord of the Flies, he continued to write, with his work becoming increasingly rooted in the past and more symbolic. The first of Golding's books from this period, The Spire, published in 1964 was narrated in a stream-of-conscious style by the unreliable Dean Jocelin while he struggles to see the construction of a huge cathedral spire, too large for its foundations, the character believes God has chosen him to complete.

In 1967, Golding published The Pyramid. Set in the 1920s, the novel tells three separate narratives linked by two main characters. Both The Spire and The Pyramid received strong reviews and seemed to reinvigorate Golding's reputation in the literary world at the time.

Golding's writing output began to wane as he began to deal with personal struggles, which weighed on him, and the author seemed to become less enthusiastic about producing new work for his publisher. After The Pyramid, it would be four years before Golding published The Scorpion God in 1971, which was a collection of prior short novels including Envoy Extraordinary which had been initially written as early as 1956.

It would not be until 1979 before Golding published another novel. Darkness Visible, a novel that explores themes of insanity and morality through parallel stories of a disfigured boy who grows up to become a cultish object for his kindness, and twins who struggle with individual, would further be hailed as a comeback for Golding. Darkness Visible received strong reviews and went on to win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize that year.

First edition of The Paper Men

In 1980, Golding published the first book, Rites of Passage, in his planned trilogy To the Ends of the Earth. Set in the early 19th century aboard a British ship transporting prisoners to a penal colony in Australia, Rites of Passage explored familiar themes for Golding of the illusion of civilization, the corrupting influence of isolation. The book won the Man Booker Prize in 1980, and the trilogy, continued in 1987's Close Quarters and 1989's Fire Down Below has since been regarded as some of Golding's best work.

In 1983, Golding was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which marked the height of the author's literary fame. A year after being awarded the Nobel Prize, Golding published The Paper Men. This novel was unusual for Golding as a contemporary story which seemed, in retrospect, to have been a partially autobiographical story of a middle-aged writer with a failing marriage, a drinking problem, and an obsessed would-be biographer scheming to gain possession of the writer's personal papers.

Fire Down Below was the last novel published in Golding's lifetime. The novel, The Double Tongue, was discovered after the author's death, and was published posthumously in 1995.

William Golding's literary output was focused on fiction, but he also published poetry, and several works of non-fiction. In 1934, as he graduated from Oxford, Golding published his only collection of poems, titled Poems. Written before his 25th birthday, Golding would later express some embarrassment concerning these poems and their juvenile content.

Golding further published collections of essays, some of which were adapted from lectures given in his classroom. One such collection, A Moving Target, initially published in 1982, would later include the author's Novel Prize Lecture. And, after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, and with his publisher hoping to capitalize on the author's publicity, Golding published An Egyptian Journal, which was a memoir account of Golding and his wife's trip on a private yacht along the Nile River.

After his death, William Golding left, aside from his twelve published novels, short stories, a play, two essay volumes, a travel journal, and over a million words of unpublished journals and notebooks. In this trove of unpublished writing, there were relatively complete unpublished works, some of which included an account of D-Day training whilst sailing on the south coast of London. Called Seahorse, the account was written by Golding in 1948. He also wrote an unpublished novel named Circle under the Sea about an ambitious writer who uncovers archeological treasures on the Isles of Scilly. A third published work was a novel called Short Measure.

William and Ann in later life.

William Golding met his future wife, Ann Brookfield, in 1938. The two met at the Left Book Club in London; both were engaged to other people at the time and broke off their engagements to be married in 1939. The couple had their first child, David, in 1940 and their second child, Judith, in 1945.

The Golding family.

Golding was known to drink heavily, and his relationship with his children was fraught. He had a difficult relationship with his daughter Judy's politics, while she described her father as being particularly contemptuous of her and scathing in his treatment of her. Her brother David suffered from serious depression, which included a nervous breakdown during his childhood which left him crippled him mentally for his life.

Both Golding and Judith attributed David's struggles in part to Golding's treatment of his children. As Golding aged, he became aware that his drinking was problematic and often blamed it for his lack of productivity. And, as Golding's drinking increased, his productivity dropped. He was alleged to be physically rough with Ann.

In 1966, Golding began a relationship with a student, Virginia Tiger; although there was allegedly no physical affair, Golding brought Tiger into his life and Ann was unhappy about the relationship, eventually insisting Golding stop corresponding with or seeing Tiger in 1971.

Golding died of heart failure at the age of eighty-one on June 19th, 1993, at his home in Perranarworthal, Cornwall. He was laid to rest at Holy Trinity Church in Bowerchalke, Wiltshire.

On his death, Golding offered a memoir to his wife, Ann, who would die in 1995 and was later buried beside him at Salisbury. The memoir, entitled Men and Women Now, was never intended to be published, and attempted to explain what the author described as the "monstrous" side of his character, dealing with his dependence on drinking, problems between himself and his parents, and including the suggestion that early in his life he attempted to rape a girl, Dora, who later plotted to get Golding's father to watch them having sex in a field through binoculars. The memoir, partially included in the biography of William Golding by John Carey, wrote in detail on these incidents, and also the details of the authors psychological experiments with his classes at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury.