William Gerald Golding
in full Sir William Gerald Golding
born Sept. 19, 1911, St. Columb Minor,
near Newquay, Cornwall, Eng.
died June 19, 1993, Perranarworthal, near
Falmouth, Cornwall
English novelist who in 1983 won the Nobel
Prize for Literature for his parables of the
human condition. He attracted a cult of
followers, especially among the youth of the
post-World War II generation.
Educated at Marlborough Grammar School,
where his father taught, and at Brasenose
College, Oxford, Golding graduated in 1935.
After working in a settlement house and in
small theatre companies, he became a
schoolmaster at Bishop Wordsworth’s School,
Salisbury. He joined the Royal Navy in 1940,
took part in the action that saw the sinking
of the German battleship Bismarck, and
commanded a rocket-launching craft during
the invasion of France in 1944. After the
war he resumed teaching at Bishop
Wordsworth’s until 1961.
Golding’s first published novel was Lord
of the Flies (1954; film 1963 and 1990), the
story of a group of schoolboys isolated on a
coral island who revert to savagery. Its
imaginative and brutal depiction of the
rapid and inevitable dissolution of social
mores aroused widespread interest. The
Inheritors (1955), set in the last days of
Neanderthal man, is another story of the
essential violence and depravity of human
nature. The guilt-filled reflections of a
naval officer, his ship torpedoed, who faces
an agonizing death are the subject of
Pincher Martin (1956). Two other novels,
Free Fall (1959) and The Spire (1964), also
demonstrate Golding’s belief that “man
produces evil as a bee produces honey.”
Darkness Visible (1979) tells the story of a
boy horribly burned in the London blitz
during World War II. His later works include
Rites of Passage (1980), which won the
Booker McConnell Prize, and its sequels,
Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below
(1989). Golding was knighted in 1988.
