Sir William Gerald Golding (1911–93) was an English novelist who wrote about the human capacity for evil and guilt. This winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature achieved literary success for his allegorical début novel Lord of the Flies, a classic of 20th-century English literature.
Born in St Columb Minor, Newquay, Cornwall, Golding was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. He published a book of poems, worked in small theatre companies, and became a teacher.
Golding worked as a lieutenant on a Royal Navy rocket launcher during World War II. He said, later, that, as a direct result of the brutalities of war, he lost his faith even in the innocence of children, famously declaring, “Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.” He returned to teach English in Salisbury 1945–61.
Golding gained international celebrity with The Lord of the Flies (1954; film 1963 and 1990,) an alarming portrayal of the fragility of civilization. The Lord of the Flies is a chronicle of a group of schoolchildren shipwrecked on a desert island during a nuclear war. Lacking the restrictive, civilizing presence of adults, the boys at first organize themselves upon democratic values, but soon regress to savagery and act in line with their worst natures. Inspired by Golding’s years as a teacher, and colored by his war experience, The Lord of the Flies has become the subject of diverse psychological, sociological, and religious interpretations.
Golding continued to write novels, as well as essays, lectures, and novellas, but none of them achieved the success of The Lord of the Flies. His notable other works include The Inheritors (1955,) Pincher Martin (1956,) Free Fall (1959,) The Spire (1964,) The Pyramid (1967,) and Darkness Visible (1979.)
Rites of Passage (1980; Booker Prize,) Close Quarter (1987,) and Fire Down Below (1989) formed a trilogy about a 19th-century voyage from England to Australia. He left a journal of over two million words, which included his daily reflections over 20 years.
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Childhood is a disease—a sickness that you grow out of.
—William Golding
Topics: Childhood, Youth
Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.
—William Golding
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things.
—William Golding
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.
—William Golding
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
Childhood is a disease—a sickness that you grow out of.
—William Golding
Topics: Childhood, Youth
To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be—I hope it is—redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.
—William Golding
Topics: Hell, The Universe
Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, “How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?”
—William Golding
Topics: Paradise
Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
—William Golding
Topics: Sleep
It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.
—William Golding
Topics: Thoughts, Thinking
Anyone who moved through those years [of the Second World War] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.
—William Golding
Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
—William Golding
Topics: Age, Aging
Maybe, he said hesitantly, maybe there is a beast.
The assembly cried out savagely and Ralph stood up in amazement.
You, Simon? You believe in this?
I don’t know, said Simon. His heartbeats were choking him.
But … The storm broke.
Sit down!
Shut up!
Take the conch!
Sod you!
Shut up!
Ralph shouted. Hear him! He’s got the conch!
What I mean is . . . maybe it’s only us.
Nuts! That was from Piggy, shocked out of decorum. Simon went on.
We could be sort of. . . . Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness. Inspiration came to him.
What’s the dirtiest thing there is?
As an answer Jack dropped into the uncomprehending silence that followed it the one crude expressive syllable. Release was immense. Those littluns who had climbed back on the twister fell off again and did not mind. The hunters were screaming with delight.
—William Golding
Topics: Evil
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