William Golding
| William Golding | |
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| Born | September 19, 1911 St Columb Minor, Cornwall, United Kingdom |
| Died | June 19, 1993 (aged 81) Perranarworthal, Cornwall, England |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | British |
| Genres | allegory, essay |
| Notable work(s) | Lord of the Flies |
| Notable award(s) | Nobel Prize in Literature 1983 |
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Sir William Gerald Golding (19 September, 1911 – 19 June, 1993) was a British novelist, poet and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate best known for his novel Lord of the Flies. He was also awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980, for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book of the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth.
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Biography
Early life
Golding was born at his maternal grandmother's house, 47 Mountwise, St Columb Minor, Newquay, Cornwall,[1] and he spent many childhood holidays there. He grew up at his family home in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement). Alec Golding was a socialist with a strong commitment to scientific rationalism, and the young Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended the school where his father taught (which should not to be confused with Marlborough College, the "public" boarding school). His mother, Mildred, kept house at 29, The Green, Marlborough, and supported the moderate campaigners for female suffrage. In 1930 Golding went to Oxford University as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, where he read Natural Sciences for two years before transferring to English Literature. He took his B.A. (Hons) Second Class in the summer of 1934, and later that year his first book, Poems, was published in London by Macmillan & Co, through the help of his Oxford friend, the anthroposophist Adam Bittleston.
Marriage and family
Golding married Ann Brookfield on 30 September 1939 and they had two children, Judy and David.[1]
War service
During World War II, Golding fought in the Royal Navy and was briefly involved in the pursuit and sinking of Germany's mightiest battleship, the 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 then in a naval action at Walcheren in which 23 out of 24 assault crafts were sunk.[2] At the war's end he returned to teaching and writing.[1]
Death
In 1985 Golding and his wife moved to Perranarworthal, near Truro, Cornwall, where he died of heart failure on June 19, 1993. He was buried in the village churchyard at Bowerchalke, South Wiltshire (near the Hampshire and Dorset county boundaries). He left the draft of a novel, The Double Tongue, set in ancient Delphi, which was published posthumously.[3][4]
Career
Writing success
In September 1953 Golding sent the typescript of a book to Faber & Faber of London. Initially rejected by a reader there, the book was championed by Charles Monteith, then a new editor at the firm. He asked for various cuts in the text and the novel was published in September 1954 as Lord of the Flies. It was shortly followed by other novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, and Free Fall.
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. Having moved 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 goddess of the earth in Greek mythology.
In 1970 Golding was a candidate for the Chancellorship of the University of Kent at Canterbury, but lost to the politician and leader of the Liberal Party, Jo Grimond. Golding won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1979, the Booker Prize in 1980, and in 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.
Fiction
Golding's often allegorical fiction makes broad use of allusions to classical literature, mythology, and Christian symbolism. No distinct thread unites his novels, and the subject matter and technique vary. However his novels are often set in closed communities such as islands, villages, monasteries, groups of hunter-gatherers, ships at sea or a pharaoh's court. His first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954; film, 1963 and 1990; play, adapted by Nigel Williams, 1995), dealt with an unsuccessful struggle against barbarism and war, thus showing the ambiguity and fragility of civilization. It has also been said that it is an allegory of World War II. The Inheritors (1955) looked back into prehistory, advancing the thesis that humankind's evolutionary ancestors, "the new people" (generally identified with homo sapiens sapiens), triumphed over a gentler race (generally identified with Neanderthals) as much by violence and deceit as by natural superiority. The Spire 1964 follows the building (and near collapse) of a huge spire onto a medieval cathedral church (generally assumed to be Salisbury Cathedral; the church and the spire itself act as a potent symbols both of the dean's highest spiritual aspirations and of his worldly vanities. His 1954 novel Pincher Martin concerns the last moments of a sailor thrown into the north Atlantic after his ship is attacked. The structure is echoed by that of the later Booker Prize winner by Yann Martel, Life of Pi. The 1967 novel The Pyramid comprises three separate stories linked by a common setting (a small English town in the 1920s) and narrator. The Scorpion God (1971) is a volume of three short novels set in a prehistoric African hunter-gatherer band ('Clonk, Clonk'), an ancient Egyptian court ('The Scorpion God') and the court of a roman emperor ('Envoy Extraordinary'). The last of these is a reworking of his 1958 play The Brass Butterfly.
Golding's later novels include Darkness Visible (1979), The Paper Men (1984), and the comic-historical sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth (BBC TV 2005), comprising the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989).
Lord of the Flies
The book is about a group of boys who are stranded on a tropical island without any adults. At first they seem very excited about the situation and vote for one of the boys, Ralph, to be their leader. Another one of the boys, Jack, leaves the group to form his own tribe, which becomes more and more violent and obsessed with hunting pigs and the so-called beast that the boys believe lives on the island. At the end of the book, they try to kill Ralph before they are all rescued by a naval officer. The title of the book comes from a direct translation of the Hebrew word Beelzebub, meaning the devil. Ralph, the main character in the story, is a fair and decent boy; he is the only boy who will listen to Piggy. Piggy is an overweight boy who is made fun of by everyone else for being fat and because he wears glasses and suffers from asthma, even though he is smarter than the rest, and is the brains behind most of Ralph's ideas.
Ralph continually stresses to them the importance of making a signal fire on top of the mountain, so that any passing ships might see the smoke and come to rescue them. He tells the boys, "The fire is the most important thing on the island. How can we ever be rescued except by luck, if we don't keep a fire going?" The rest of the boys become more savage and are more interested in hunting than keeping the fire going. There is also the added threat that the boys believe there is a 'beastie' on the island. Simon is the only one who eventually deduces that the beast is human, and inside them. When Simon crawls out from the forest in the dark to tell the others, the boys believe he is the beast, and Ralph and Piggy join in as they beat him to death with their bare hands.
Out of all of the boys the one who changes the most on the island is Jack. He was head boy in his choir, who soon become the hunters, and he is more persistent than Ralph in his desire to become the chief, saying "I ought to be chief, because I'm chapter chorister and head boy". Jack also has an unpleasant personality, expressed when saying "Shut up, Fatty." to Piggy. Jack shows his savageness very early on and later develops an even darker personality. While Jack was at first unable to kill a pig, because of the "knife cutting into living flesh.", he later begins to enjoy the hunting of the pigs with a spear, and is not at all upset by the deaths of other boys. When Piggy falls to his death after being knocked off a cliff, Jack screams "That's what you'll get! I meant that!" In the end everyone but Piggy and Simon, who was killed by Jack's tribe, are lured to join them either by the knowledge that the hunters would provide them with meat, or are tortured and bullied into joining them.
The boys are rescued by a British navy officer; he thinks that the boys are playing a wild game when he arrives. Ironically, his ship, a cruiser, symbolizes the boys' violent behavior on the island as the ship is heading towards the enemy.
Major works
- Poems (1934)
- Lord of the Flies (1954)
- The Inheritors (1955)
- Pincher Martin (1956)
- The Brass Butterfly (play) (1958)
- Free Fall (1959)
- The Spire (1964)
- The Hot Gates (essays) (1965)
- The Pyramid (1967)
- The Scorpion God (1971)
- Darkness Visible (1979)
- A Moving Target (essays) (1982)
- The Paper Men (1984)
- An Egyptian Journal (1985)
- To the Ends of the Earth (trilogy)
- Rites of Passage (1980)
- Close Quarters (1987)
- Fire Down Below (1989)
- The Double Tongue (posthumous) (1996)
See also
- Novels by William Golding
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Kevin McCarron, ‘Golding, Sir William Gerald (1911–1993)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006 accessed 13 Nov 2007
- ↑ Mortimer, John (1986). Character Parts. London: Penguin. ISBN 0-14-008959-4.
- ↑ Golding, William (1996). The Double Tongue. London: Faber. ISBN 9780571178032.
- ↑ Bruce Lambert (20 June 1993). "William Golding Is Dead at 81; The Author of 'Lord of the Flies'", The New York Times. Retrieved on 2007-09-06.
External links
- The Spire a sixth form perspective at William Howard School
- Golding's Life and work reviewed at the Educational Paperback Association
- Biography of William Golding at the Nobel Prize website
- Interview by Mary Lynn Scott- Universal Pessimist, Cosmic Optimist
- Faber and Faber - UK publisher of William Golding
- William Golding Ltd Website of Golding family.
- Last Words An account of Golding's last evening by D.M. Thomas - Guardian - Saturday 10 June 2006 (Review Section)
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Kevin McCarron (online edn, May 2006), Golding, Sir William Gerald (1911–1993)
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