 |
| William Golding |
Sir William Gerald Golding (19 September 1911–19 June 1993) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his novel Lord of the Flies, he won a Nobel Prize in Literature, and was also awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth.
William Golding was born in his grandmother's house, 47 Mount Wise, Newquay, Cornwall. The house was known as Karenza, the Cornish language word for love, and he spent many childhood holidays there. He grew up in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School.
In 1930 Golding went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read Natural Sciences for two years before transferring to English Literature.
More information: BBC
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 Philosophy and English in 1939, then just English from 1945 to 1961 at Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury, Wiltshire.
 |
| William Golding |
Lord of the Flies focuses on a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves.
Published in September 17 1954, Lord of the Flies was Golding's first novel. Although it was not a great success at the time, selling fewer than three thousand copies in the United States during 1955 before going out of print, it soon went on to become a best-seller.
The book takes place in the midst of an unspecified nuclear war. Some of the marooned characters are ordinary students, while others arrive as a musical choir under an established leader. With the exception of the choirboys, Sam, and Eric, they appear never to have encountered each other before. The book portrays their descent into savagery; left to themselves on a paradisiacal island, far from modern civilization, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state.
Golding wrote his book as a counterpoint to R.M. Ballantyne's youth novel The Coral Island (1858), and included specific references to it, such as the rescuing naval officer's description of the children's pursuit of Ralph as a jolly good show, like the Coral Island.
 |
| Lord of the Flies Cover |
Golding's three central characters -Ralph, Piggy and Jack- have been interpreted as caricatures of Ballantyne's Coral Island protagonists.
At an allegorical level, the central theme is the conflicting human impulses toward civilization and social organization, living by rules, peacefully and in harmony, and toward the will to power.
Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality.
How these play out, and how different people feel the influences of these form a major subtext of Lord of the Flies.
The name Lord of the Flies is a literal translation of Beelzebub.
What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?
William Golding
No comments:
Post a Comment