Historical Figure
Sir William Golding
1911–1993
British novelist, poet, and playwright (1911–1993)
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Biography
Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), Golding published another 12 volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, Golding was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. Golding was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature.
In Their Own Words (5)
I don’t like the word "allegorical", I don’t like the word "symbolic", the word I really like is "mythic" and people always think that means "full of lies" when what it really means is full of a truth that cannot be told in any other way but a story.
Interview in regard to his work Rites of Passage, quoted in The Dreams of William Golden, BBC Arena (2012) , 2012
"Aren't you going to swim?"Piggy shook his head."I can't swim. I wasn't allowed. My asthma—""Sucks to your ass-mar!" Piggy bore this with a kind of humble patience.
Ch. 1: The Sound of the Shell , 1954
"Aren't there any grownups at all?""I don't think so."The fair boy said this solemnly; but then the delight of a realized ambition overcame him. In the middle of the scar he stood on his head and grinned at the reversed fat boy."No grownups!"
Ch. 1: The Sound of the Shell , 1954
Jack stood up as he said this, the bloodied knife in his hand. The two boys faced each other. There was the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled common-sense.
Ch. 4: Painted Faces and Long Hair , 1954
However Simon thought of the beast, there rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick.
Ch. 6: Beast from Air. , 1954
Timeline
The story of Sir William Golding, told in moments.
Joined the Royal Navy and served throughout World War II, participating in the D-Day landings. The violence he witnessed permanently shaped his view of human nature. Before the war, he'd been a schoolteacher and aspiring poet.
Published Lord of the Flies after 21 rejections. The novel about boys descending into savagery on a deserted island became a bestseller and one of the most assigned books in English-speaking schools.
Won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The committee praised his "perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth." He'd published 12 novels by then.
Died of heart failure in Perranarworthal, Cornwall, at 81. Knighted in 1988. The Times later ranked him third among the greatest British writers since 1945.
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