About the AuthorWilliam Golding was born in Cornwall, England in 1911. His father worked as a schoolmaster and was an ardent advocate of rationalism. His mother was an active suffragette who took a stand for the women’s right to vote. Under his parents, William Golding’s early education started at the school his father ran (Marlborough Grammar School). His first dab at writing was at the age of twelve, also the age when he first started bullying people. Later on, William would explain his childhood self as a bad behaved child, even saying, “I enjoyed hurting people.” After secondary school, he attended Brasenose College at Oxford University in 1930. He had been brought up to become a scientist, and spent two years studying science like his father wanted. Yet, he ended up choosing to study English literature in his junior year of college, which followed his true interests. While he was still at college, a volume of Golding's poems was published as part of Macmillan's Contemporary Poets series. Then in 1935, he graduated from Oxford with a Bachelor of Arts in English. Also, he got a diploma in education. After that, William worked in community houses and even the theater for a brief period of time. However, he eventually opted for his father’s path and started teaching English and philosophy at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury.
Golding was not without a sense of duty, however, and joined the Royal Navy to fight in World War II. During World War II, he fought enemy battleships at the Sinking of the Bismarck, and crucial in warding off enemy submarines and planes. William was even placed in command of a rocket-launching craft. Through his World War II experiences, he learned 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.” This experience in war would be instrumental in his writing years later. |
In 1945, after World War II ended, William went back to teaching and writing english. Ten years later, he received the honorary designation Commander of the British Empire (CBE) and was then knighted in 1988. In 1954, his first novel was published which was called The Lord of the Flies. Following the publication of his best-known work, The Lord of the Flies, Golding was granted membership in the Royal Society of Literature in 1955. In 1983, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. William Golding died in Perranarworthal, Cornwall, England, in 1993.
“Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.” “The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.” |
The Background Behind The BookIn 1954, William Golding wrote his novel The Lord of the Flies. Through his experience in the navy (1940-1945), he experienced the incredible cruelty and barbarity lying within man. In writing the book, he connected these experiences with his childhood experiences with bullying. As such, the novel is about a group of teenager boys stranded on a deserted island who fight for dominance. This story gives a clear picture of the savagery of man as the boys brutally turn on one another in the face of an imagined enemy. While he wrote this, William declared that “man produces evil, as a bee produces honey.” Golding uses a tropical island, usually a protected environment, as a showcase of the dual savagery and civilization in mankind. The boys act and think according to their whims, and show that there cannot be civilization without savagery inside it. The reason for this was that Golding himself had lost faith in the rationalization of his father’s belief in the perfection of mankind. As such, Golding’s writing was often a metaphor for mankind’s inherent desire to dominate and the paradox of evil within that desire.
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