William Golding

Plaque at Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury.

William Golding was born in his maternal grandmother's house, 47 Mount Wise, Newquay,[4] Cornwall.[5] The house was known as Karenza, the Cornish language word for love, and he spent many childhood holidays there.[6] He grew up in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father (Alec Golding) was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement), the school the young Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended.[7] His mother, Mildred (Curnoe),[8] kept house at 29, The Green, Marlborough, and was a campaigner for female suffrage. Golding's mother, who was Cornish and whom he considered "a superstitious celt", used to tell him old Cornish fairy tales from her own childhood.[9] In 1930 Golding went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read Natural Sciences for two years before transferring to English Literature.[10] His original tutor was the chemist Thomas Taylor.[11] In a private journal and in a memoir for his wife, Golding recounted his attempted rape of a 15 year old girl when he was 18 and on his first holiday from Oxford.[12]

Golding took his B.A. degree with Second Class Honours in the summer of 1934, and later that year a book of his Poems was published by Macmillan & Co, with the help of his Oxford friend, the anthroposophist Adam Bittleston.

He was a schoolmaster teaching English and music at Maidstone Grammar School 1938 - 1940 and then teaching Philosophy and English in 1939, then just English from 1945 to 1962 at Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury, Wiltshire.

John Carey, the emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford university, was given access to a personal journal kept by Golding in order to write his biography, in which Golding describes trying to set up his students against each other during his teaching years, which gave him inspiration for his first novel.[13]

Golding married Ann Brookfield, an analytical chemist,[14]^(p161) on 30 September 1939. They had two children, David (born 1940) and Judith (born July, 1945).[5]

During World War II, Golding joined the Royal Navy in 1940.[15] He served in a destroyer which was briefly involved in the pursuit and sinking of the German battleship Bismarck. He also participated in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, commanding a landing ship that fired salvoes of rockets onto the beaches, and was in action at Walcheren in which 23 out of 24 assault craft were sunk.[16]

While his father had been an insistent atheist, Golding himself was a Christian, though a member of no established Church.[17]

In 1985, Golding and his wife moved to Tullimaar House at Perranarworthal, near Truro, Cornwall. He died of heart failure eight years later on 19 June 1993. His body was buried in the parish churchyard of Bowerchalke, Wiltshire (near the Hampshire and Dorset county border).

On his death he left the draft of a novel, The Double Tongue, set in ancient Delphi, which was published posthumously in 1995.[2][18]

Golding, Artur Lundkvist and Jean-Paul Sartre at a writers' congress in Leningrad, USSR, 1963.

Whilst still a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury, Golding began writing a manuscript for a novel initially titled Strangers from Within in 1951.[19] In September 1953, after rejections from seven other publishers, Golding sent a manuscript to Faber & Faber and was initially rejected by their reader, Jan Perkins, who labelled it as "Rubbish & dull. Pointless".[20] His book, however, was championed by Charles Monteith, a new editor at the firm. Monteith asked for some changes to the text and the novel was published in September 1954 as Lord of the Flies.

After moving in 1958 from Salisbury to nearby Bowerchalke, he met his fellow villager and walking companion James Lovelock. The two discussed Lovelock's hypothesis, that the living matter of the planet Earth functions like a single organism, and Golding suggested naming this hypothesis after Gaia, the Titan of the earth in Greek mythology.[21] His publishing success made it possible for Golding to resign his teaching post at Bishop Wordsworth's School in 1961, and he spent that academic year in the United States as writer-in-residence at Hollins College, near Roanoke, Virginia.

Golding won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Darkness Visible in 1979, and the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980. In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and was according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography "an unexpected and even contentious choice".[5]

In 1988 Golding was appointed a Knight Bachelor.[22] In September 1993, only a few months after his sudden death, the First International William Golding Conference was held in France, where Golding's presence had been promised and was eagerly expected.[23]

Despite his success, Golding "was abnormally thin-skinned when it came to criticism of his work. He simply could not read even the mildest reservation and on occasion left the country when his books were published."[24]

His first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954; film, 1963 and 1990; play, adapted by Nigel Williams, 1995), describes a group of boys stranded on a tropical island reverting to savagery. The Inheritors (1955) shows "new people" (generally identified with Homo sapiens sapiens), triumphing over a gentler race (generally identified with Neanderthals) by deceit and violence. His 1956 novel Pincher Martin records the thoughts of a drowning sailor. Free Fall (1959) explores the issue of free choice as a prisoner held in solitary confinement in a German POW camp during World War Two looks back over his life. The Spire (1964) follows the building (and near collapse) of a huge spire onto a medieval cathedral (generally assumed to be Salisbury Cathedral); the spire symbolizing both spiritual aspiration and worldly vanity.

In his 1967 novel The Pyramid three separate stories in a shared setting (a small English town in the 1920s) are linked by a narrator, and The Scorpion God (1971) consists of three novellas, the first set in a prehistoric African hunter-gatherer band ('Clonk, Clonk'), the second in an ancient Egyptian court ('The Scorpion God') and the third in the court of a Roman emperor ('Envoy Extraordinary'). The last of these reworks his 1958 play The Brass Butterfly. His later novels include Darkness Visible (1979), which is about a terrorist group, a paedophile teacher, and a mysterious angel-like figure who survives a fire in the Blitz, The Paper Men (1984) which is about the conflict between a writer and his biographer, and a sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, which includes Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989), the first book of which (originally intended as a stand-alone novel) won the Booker Prize.

The novel Lord of the Flies is arguably Golding's most famous book, being read by school children around the world today. It is widely seen by many people as a reflection of how William Golding saw the world after his service in the war. He saw the world and the humans within it as inherently evil, regardless of their age or other factors.

• Poems (1934)

• The Brass Butterfly (1958)

• Lord of the Flies (1954)
• The Inheritors (1955)
• Pincher Martin (1956)
• Free Fall (1959)
• The Spire (1964)
• The Pyramid (1967)
• The Scorpion God (1971)
• Darkness Visible (1979)
• The Paper Men (1984)
• To the Ends of the Earth (trilogy)
  • Rites of Passage (1980)
  • Close Quarters (1987)
  • Fire Down Below (1989)
• The Double Tongue (posthumous publication 1995)[25]

• The Hot Gates (1965)
• A Moving Target (1982)
• An Egyptian Journal (1985)

• Seahorse was written in 1948. It is a biographical account of sailing on the south coast of England whilst in training for D-Day.[26]
• Circle Under the Sea is an adventure novel about a writer who sails to discover archaeological treasures off the coast of the Scilly Isles.[27]
• Short Measure is a novel set in a British boarding school.[28]