William Golding

Who is William Golding?

William Gerald Golding
(Image from here)

William Golding was an acclaimed 20th century English author and Nobel Prize laureate. Born in 1911 in Cornwall, England, Golding was raised by his grandmother. While attending Oxford University, he developed a passion for writing, which eventually prompted him to switch majors from Natural Sciences to English Literature. In 1954, Golding wrote his first novel, Lord of the Flies, which is still his most succesful work to date, despite writing more than 20 other novels, plays, non-fiction texts, and collections of poems. The tenacious author received many awards during his lifetime, most notably the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. William Golding retired from writing around 1990, and lived comfortably near his childhood home of Newquay until 1993, when he died of heart failure.

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What was it like to live during his time?

A view Golding may have seen as Commander
of a Britsh landing craft on D-Day.
(Image from here)

Through the childhood and adolescence of William Golding, the world was experiencing a renaissance of art and literature, including writers such as Ernest Hemingway and H.G. Wells, who would've influenced the young author while growing up. Throughout the 1930's, a bitter depression gripped the global society, creating tension between most of the countries of the Western world, which culminated in the Second World War from 1939 to 1945. This intense battle for order in Europe led to Golding joining the Royal Navy shortly after the war broke out. Golding also participated in the D-Day invasion at Normandy; this traumatic experience haunted him for the rest of his life, giving him a depressing outlook on the world, and inspiring him to write many of his works as political allegory on current issues. The world went from being a very happy place to a dark and violent one in William Golding's lifetime, with the threat of Communism and the atom bomb always hanging over everyone's head. Around the time of his death, the USSR had fallen and peace was restored to most of the modern world again.

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Why do you think Golding wrote the novel, Lord of the Flies?
I think that Golding wrote Lord of the Flies because he wanted to express his displeasure with the way society was changing, where good hard-working people would often lose out to people who had aesthetic appeal, but lacked substance. I believe that Golding saw the way the United States was moving towards idol worship during the mid-1950's, with the introduction of Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. He wanted to bring people back to how he believed society should function, so he created a new society within Lord of the Flies, as a sort-of social experiment. The colony had the culture of modern society, but was missing the normal rules and regulations. Lord of the Flies was the result.