William Golding

Sir William Gerald Golding (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. He is most famous for his first novel, *Lord of the Flies* (1954), and went on to publish twelve more works of fiction during his life. In 1980, he won the Booker Prize for *Rites of Passage*, the opening book of his sea trilogy *To the Ends of the Earth*. Golding received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 for his literary achievements and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, *The Times* placed him third on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945."

Golding was born on 19 September 1911 in Newquay, Cornwall, at his maternal grandmother’s house, 47 Mount Wise, a place called Karenza—the Cornish word for love—where he often holidayed as a child. His father, Alec, was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School, and his mother, Mildred, was a campaigner for women’s suffrage. She was Cornish and, in her son’s words, “a superstitious Celt” who told him old Cornish ghost stories. The family lived at 29, The Green, Marlborough, Wiltshire, and Golding attended the school where his father taught alongside his older brother Joseph. In 1930, he entered Brasenose College, Oxford, studying natural sciences for two years before switching to English for his final two. His original tutor was the chemist Thomas Taylor. In a private journal and a memoir for his wife, Golding admitted that as a teenager during a vacation, he attempted to rape a teenage girl he had taken piano lessons with, believing she “wanted heavy sex.” He earned a second-class honours BA in the summer of 1934, and later that year, with help from his Oxford friend Adam Bittleston, Macmillan & Co. published a book of his poems. In 1935, Golding taught English at Michael Hall School, a Steiner-Waldorf school in Streatham, South London, for two years. After a year studying for a Diploma of Education in Oxford, he became a schoolmaster at Maidstone Grammar School from 1938 to 1940, then moved to Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury in April 1940, where he taught English, philosophy, Greek, and drama until joining the Royal Navy on 18 December 1940. He returned to the same school after the war, teaching those subjects until 1961. Golding kept a personal journal for over 22 years, from 1971 until the night before his death, containing about 2.4 million words. Initially used to record dreams, it became a record of his life, including reflections on his novels and memories. At one point, he described setting up his students into two groups to fight each other—an experience he drew on for *Lord of the Flies*. John Carey, an Oxford English professor, was later given unprecedented access to Golding’s unpublished papers and journals by the Golding estate, and published *William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies* in 2009.

During World War II, Golding joined the Royal Navy in 1940. He served on a destroyer briefly involved in the pursuit and sinking of the German battleship *Bismarck*. He also took part in the Normandy invasion on D-Day, commanding a landing craft that fired rocket salvoes onto the beaches. He saw action at Walcheren in October and November 1944, where 10 of 27 assault craft were sunk. Golding reached the rank of lieutenant.

Golding had a difficult relationship with alcohol. His daughter Judy Carver noted he was “always very open, if rueful, about problems with drink.” Golding himself said a self-described “crisis,” in which alcoholism played a major part, plagued him his whole life. John Carey’s biography details several binge-drinking episodes, including one in 1963 while on holiday in Greece, where Golding was meant to be finishing *The Spire*. After working in the morning, he would drink at a local café at midday, then move on to ouzo and brandy in the evening, earning a reputation for “provoking explosions.” The novel’s publication in 1964 did not help; scathingly negative reviews on a BBC radio broadcast affected him severely. After *The Pyramid* came out in 1967, Golding experienced severe writer’s block, driven by family anxieties, insomnia, and dejection. He eventually felt unable to cope with the intensity of his life without drinking heavily. Tim Kendall suggests this experience appears in Golding’s character Wilf in *The Paper Men*, “an ageing novelist whose alcohol-sodden journeys across Europe are bankrolled by the continuing success of his first book.” By the late 1960s, Golding was hopelessly addicted to alcohol, which he called “the old, old anodyne.” His recovery began with studying Carl Jung’s writings, and in 1971 he traveled to Switzerland to see Jung’s landscapes for himself.