Golding, Sir William (Gerald)

Golding, Sir William (Gerald), 1911–93, English novelist. Praised for his highly imaginative and original writings, Golding was basically concerned with the eternal nature of man. In his best-known work, the allegorical Lord of the Flies (1954), he described the nightmarish adventures of a group of English schoolboys stranded on an island and traced their degeneration from a state of innocence to blood lust and savagery. His later works include The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Spire (1964), The Pyramid (1967), The Scorpion God (1971), Darkness Visible (1979), and a maritime trilogy: Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989). Golding received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983 and was knighted in 1988.

Bibliography

See studies by A. Johnston (1980), P. Redpath (1986) and J. Cary (1989).