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After establishing his career first as a teacher and then as a writer, William Golding stepped into the world of letters. Most of his writings are based on his life experiences, dealing with the phenomenon of human life and nature. His works were published and acknowledged internationally during his lifetime. Since he is considered the most important modernist poet and writer, his pieces fail to follow the paradigms set by the previous authors. He adopted a distinctive writing style, avoiding complex structures, heavy use of poetic devices and exaggeration. Rather, his allegorical style and symbolism set him apart from the other authors. The recurring themes in most of his pieces are loss, death, the darker aspects of humanity, violence, and power.
William Golding’s Major Works
Best Novels: He was an outstanding novelist, some of his best novels include The Lord of the Flies, Free Fall, The Spire, The Pyramid, Darkness Visible, The Paper Man and The Double Tongue.
Other Works: Besides novels, he tried his hands on nonfiction, poetry and short stores some of them include The Hot Gates, The Moving Target, Poems 1934, The Brass Butterfly, and An Egyptian Journal.
William Golding’s Influence on Future Literature
William brought revolutionary changes to the world of literature. His thought-provoking ideas, the war experiences, and the analytical approach inspired many writers and critics. His literary qualities and unique ways of expression helped shape the opinions of the readers on how negative instinct and lust for power corrode the beautiful fabric of society. His indifferent writing style and way of expressing things and ideas influenced many post-modernist authors. He successfully presented his ideas in his writings that even today writers try to imitate his unique style, considering him a beacon for writing poetry and novels.
William Golding’s work has been described as pessimistic, mythical, spiritual—an allegorist who used his novels as a canvas to paint portraits of man’s constant struggle between his civilized self and his hidden, darker nature. With the appearance of Lord of the Flies, Golding’s first published novel, the author began his career as both a college campus cult favorite and one of the late 20th century’s distinctive—and much debated—literary talents. Golding’s appeal was summarized 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.”
Though it was the novel that established Golding’s reputation, Lord of the Flies was rejected by 21 publishers before Faber & Faber accepted the 43-year-old schoolmaster’s book. While the story has been compared to such works as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, Golding’s novel is actually the author’s “answer” to 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 of the same character names (two of the lead characters are named Ralph and Jack in both books). The similarity, however, ends there.
Golding’s other works of fiction include The Paper Men (1984), Darkness Visible (1979), The Spire (1964), Free Fall (1959), Pincher Martin (1955), and The Inheritors (1955).
Golding died in Cornwall on June 19, 1993. “As a novelist, William Golding had the gift of terror,” Joseph J. Feeney wrote in an obituary for America. “It is not the terror of a quick scare—a ghost, a scream, a slash that catches the breath—but a primal, fearsome sense of human evil and human mystery. ... William Golding was, with Graham Greene, the finest British novelist of our half-century. His fellow novelist Malcolm Bradbury memorialized him as ‘a writer who was both impishly difficult, and wonderfully monumental,’ and a teller of ‘primal stories—about the birth of speech, the dawn of evil, the strange sources of art.’”
Awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, the coveted Booker Prize in 1980, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1979, William Golding’s writing continues to touch every country in the world and is today read in more than 35 languages. He was knighted by the Queen in 1988, and his ‘you-must-have-read-this’ classic novel Lord of the Flies is a global phenomenon.
In addition to 12 novels, Golding also wrote plays, many essays and reviews, several short stories, some poems, and a travel book about Egypt. Many of his attempts at other works survive in manuscript or typescript. Born in Cornwall in 1911, he seems to have known from childhood that he wanted to be a writer. His first published work appeared when he was twenty-three. Read more about Golding’s early life.
'Words may, through the devotion, the skill, the passion and the luck of writers, prove to be the most powerful thing in the world'.
William Golding, Nobel Lecture, 1983
Quite apart from his obvious achievements as a writer, it is worth pointing out the vast range and diversity of the subject matter of his novels, and the challenge he set himself. Perhaps his greatest achievement is to have lived through the most terrible and inhumane of centuries, and to have left behind a body of work that can be said to reflect much of the horror of that time as well as an understanding of it.
At his death Golding left behind numerous volumes of daily journals (1971-1993), recording his innermost thoughts and trying out all kinds of ideas.
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