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Reminiscences
Golding touched the lives of many people and we have a collection of reminiscences from the people who knew him best. Golding’s daughter Judy writes about The Inheritors and the book’s relationship with Golding’s family, while his grandson Roger recalls his grandfather in a touching tribute. Writer and historian Peter Green remembers his friend Bill Golding with a touching story about their last meeting. Nicola Presley has written about Golding’s early life and the impact it had on his books.
The books
The other novels, all astonishingly different from each other, are classics in their own right. The Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, read extensively from The Inheritors at Golding’s memorial service in 1993, and the setting itself – Salisbury Cathedral – evocatively recalled The Spire, a perfect merger of the individual and the local with the infinite and the symbolic. Golding had great gifts as a comic writer and satirist – highly underrated – and these are visible in The Scorpion God, The Paper Men and To the Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy.
Students, teachers and general readers alike will enjoy exploring these wonderful and highly individual fictional worlds in our Explore & Search section and in Books and Timeline on this website. For researchers, we are collating a bibliography for critical works on Golding.
The role of literary contribution of William Golding
Golding's often allegorical fiction makes broad use of allusions to classical literature, mythology, and Christianity symbolism. Although no distinct thread unites his novels and his technique varies, Golding deals principally with evil and emerges with what has been characterized as a kind of dark optimism. Golding's first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954; films in 1963 and 1990), introduced one of the recurrent themes of his fiction—the conflict between humanity's innate barbarism and the civilizing influence of reason. The Inheritors (1955) reaches into prehistory, advancing the thesis that mankind's evolutionary ancestors, "the fire-builders," triumphed over a gentler race as much by violence and deceit as by natural superiority. In Pincher Martin (1956) Golding explores the conflict between the good and evil aspects of our nature again as that given to us at birth and what we change it into by our own will, even to the point of futilely challenging our very existence and its demise. The novel caused a great controversy in the humanistic and relativistic literary world of his time, including calls for him to rewrite the ending. Golding sought in several interviews to explain his intent and the “meaning” of the story in religious terms. This so backfired on him that he never again would explain his work, only referring the reader to what he derives from the story. In Free Fall (1959), he explores how the consequences of our actions make us who we have become, using flashbacks. The Spire (1964) is an allegory concerning the protagonist's obsessive determination to build a great cathedral spire, regardless of the consequences.
William Golding has made quite an impact on the world with his most famous work, Lord of the Flies. This novel about a group of young upper class English schoolboys deserted on an island is now required reading in most high schools in America. Based on the premise that human nature, including that of well-bred children, is inherently evil, this book delivers a frightening view of mankind. It has become a modern classic. It has challenged many people’s perspectives on human nature in a way that few other books have. It has assured Golding of his position as one of the most important writers of the post-war period.
Golding's later novels include Darkness Visible (1979), in which he explores dual possibilities of fate in our inner response to tragedies through the twin orphans after World War II, and The Paper Men (1984), about the unraveling of pretentious literary and academic figures. He also wrote a historical sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, which includes Rites of Passage (Booker Prize, 1981), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989). These books frame a critical exposé of British class attitudes of the nineteenth century in a long sea voyage from England to Australia. It has been produced as a BBC drama series.
Lord of the Flies is an allegorical novel about a group of young boys who are stranded on a desert island and subsequently attempt to govern themselves, a task at which they fail disastrously. Its stances on the already controversial subjects of human nature and individual welfare versus the common good earned it position 70 on the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000.[1]
Published in 1954, Lord of the Flies was Golding's first novel, and although it was not a great success at the time —selling fewer than 3,000 copies in the United States during 1955 before going out of print—it soon went on to become a bestseller, and by the early 1960s was required reading in many schools and colleges. It was adapted to film in 1963 by Peter Brook, and again in 1990 by Harry Hook.
The title is a reference to the Hebrew name Beelzebub (בעל זבוב, Baal-zvuv, "god of the fly" or "host of the fly") a name sometimes used as a synonym for Satan.
Plot summary
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