Initially, the tale of a group of schoolboys stranded on an island during their escape from war received mixed reviews and sold only modestly in its hardcover edition. The novel was rejected by twenty-one publishers before Faber & Faber accepted the forty-three-year-old schoolmaster's book. But his frustration would not last long, when, in 1954, Golding created The Lord of the Flies. He wrote three novels, all of which went unpublished. Golding had enhanced his knowledge of Greek history and mythology by reading while at sea, and when he returned to his post at Bishop Wordsworth's School in 1945, he began furthering his writing career. Lieutenant Golding served five years in the British Royal Navy and saw active duty in the North Atlantic, commanding a rocket launching craft. His teaching career was interrupted in 1940, however, with the outbreak of World War II (1939–45). At twenty-two, a year before taking his degree in English, Golding saw his first literary work published-a poetry collection simply titled Poems.Īfter graduating from Oxford in 1935, Golding continued the family tradition by becoming a schoolmaster in Salisbury, Wiltshire. Golding remained an enthusiastic writer and, upon entering Brasenose College of Oxford University, abandoned his plans to study science, preferring to read English literature. Since the age of seven, Golding had been writing stories, and at the age of twelve he attempted to write a novel. As a boy, his favorite authors included H. His father, Alex, was a schoolmaster, while his mother, Mildred, was active in the Women's Suffrage Movement (the movement for women's right to vote).

Golding was born in Saint Columb Minor in Cornwall, England, in 1911. Golding's reputation rests primarily upon his first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), which is consistently regarded as an effective and disturbing portrayal of the fragility of civilization. The winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature, William Golding is among the most popular and influential British authors to have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century.

Golding william