Stephen King has often cited Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies as an influence on his career. He writes, “It was, so far as I can remember, the first book with hands – strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat.”
William Golding was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies, he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime.
Golding was born in Cornwall, England on 19 September 1911, and grew up in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father, Alec Golding, was a science master at the local school. His mother, Mildred, was active in the Women’s Suffrage Movement.
As a boy, his favourite authors included H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Golding began writing stories when he was seven, and at age twelve he attempted to write a novel. Still an enthusiastic writer at Oxford University, he abandoned plans to study science, to read English literature instead. At twenty-two, a year before taking his English degree, Golding saw his first literary work published—a poetry collection simply titled Poems.
Golding married Ann Brookfield in 1939 who was an analytical chemist and they had two children.
In 1951, whilst working as a teacher, Golding began writing a manuscript initially titled ‘Strangers from Within’. In September 1953, after rejections from seven other publishers, Golding sent a manuscript to Faber and Faber and was initially rejected as “Rubbish & dull. Pointless”. However, a new editor at the firm asked for some changes, and his novel was published in September 1954 as Lord of the Flies.
As a result of his contributions to literature, Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the Booker Prize in 1980 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on its list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”.
William Golding died of heart failure on 19 June 1993, aged 81.