Son of Alec Golding, a science master atMarlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement), and Mildred (née Curnoe)[4] William Golding was born on 19 September 1911 at his maternal grandmother's house, 47 Mount Wise,Newquay,[5]Cornwall.[6] The house was known asKarenza, theCornish word for love, and he spent many childhood holidays there.[7] The Golding family lived at 29, The Green,Marlborough, Wiltshire, and Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended the school where their father taught.[8] Golding's mother was a campaigner for female suffrage. She wasCornish, and was considered by her son "a superstitiousCelt" who used to tell him old Cornish ghost stories from her own childhood.[9]
In 1930, Golding went toBrasenose College, Oxford, where he readnatural sciences for two years before transferring to English for his final two years.[10] Golding's originaltutor was the chemistThomas Taylor.[11] In a private journal and in a memoir for his wife, Golding admitted that, as a teenager during a vacation, he tried to rape a teenage girl with whom he had previously taken piano lessons, perceiving her to have "wanted heavy sex".[12]
Golding took his B.A. degree with second class honours in the summer of 1934, and later that year a book of hisPoems was published byMacmillan & Co, with the help of his Oxford friend, theanthroposophist Adam Bittleston.
In 1935, Golding took a job teaching English atMichael Hall School, aSteiner-Waldorf school then in Streatham, South London, staying there for two years.[13] After a year in Oxford studying for a Diploma of Education, he became a schoolmaster, teaching English and music atMaidstone Grammar School from 1938 to 1940, before moving toBishop Wordsworth's School,Salisbury, in April 1940. There, Golding taught English, philosophy, Greek, and drama until joining the navy on 18 December 1940, reporting for duty atHMS Raleigh. He returned in 1945 and taught the same subjects until 1961.[14]
Golding kept a personal journal for over 22 years[15] from 1971 until the night before his death; it contained approximately 2.4 million words in total. The journal was initially used by Golding to record his dreams, but over time it began to function as a record of his life. The journals contained insights including retrospective thoughts about Golding's novels and memories from his past. At one point, Golding described setting his students up into two groups to fight each other – an experience he drew on when writingLord of the Flies.[16]John Carey, an emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford University, was eventually given 'unprecedented access to Golding's unpublished papers and journals by the Golding estate'.[15] Although Golding had not written the journals specifically so that a biography could be written about him, Carey publishedWilliam Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies in 2009.[17]
DuringWorld War II, Golding joined theRoyal Navy in 1940.[18] He served on a destroyer which was briefly involved in the pursuit and sinking of the German battleshipBismarck. Additionally, Golding participated in theinvasion of Normandy on D-Day, commanding alanding craft that fired salvoes ofrockets onto the beaches. He was alsoin action at Walcheren in October and November 1944, during which time 10 out of 27 assault craft that went into the attack were sunk.[19][20] Golding rose to the rank of lieutenant.[21]
Golding had atroubled relationship with alcohol; Judy Carver notes that her father was "always very open, if rueful, about problems with drink".[22] Golding suggested that his self-described "crisis", of which alcoholism played a major part, had plagued him his entire life.[23]
John Carey mentions several instances of Golding'sbinge drinking in his biography, including Golding's experiences in 1963. Whilst on holiday inGreece when he was meant to have been finishing his novelThe Spire, Golding would, after working on his writing in the morning, go to his preferred "Kapheneion" to drink at midday.[24] By the evening, he would move on toouzo andbrandy, and developed a reputation locally for "provoking explosions".[24]
Unfortunately, the eventual publication ofThe Spire the following year did not help Golding's developing struggle with alcohol; it had precisely the opposite effect, with the novel's scathingly negative reviews in a BBC radio broadcast affecting him severely.[25]
Following the publication ofThe Pyramid in 1967, Golding experienced a severewriter's block, the result of a myriad of crises: family anxieties,insomnia, and a general sense of dejection.[23] Golding eventually became unable to deal with what he perceived to be the intense reality of his life without first drinking copious amounts of alcohol.[26]Tim Kendall suggests that these experiences manifest in Golding's writing as the character Wilf inThe Paper Men; "an ageing novelist whose alcohol-sodden journeys across Europe are bankrolled by the continuing success of his first book".[27] By the late 1960s, Golding was hopelessly addicted to alcohol – which he referred to as "the old, oldanodyne".[28]
Golding's first steps towards recovery came from his study ofCarl Jung's writings, and in what he called "an admission of discipleship," Golding travelled toSwitzerland in 1971 to see Jung's landscapes for himself.[29] That same year, Golding started keeping a journal in which he recorded and interpreted his dreams; the last entry is from the day before he died, in 1993, and the work came to be thousands of pages long by this time.[25]
The crisis did inevitably affect Golding's output, and his next novel,Darkness Visible, would be published twelve years afterThe Pyramid; a far cry from the prolific author who had produced six novels in thirteen years since the start of his career.[23] Despite this, the extent of Golding's recovery is evident from the fact that this was only the first of six further novels that Golding completed before his death.[29]
InWilliam Golding: A Critical Study (2008), George states that, “Golding experienced two things that he counts the greatest influences on his writing—first, the war and his service in the navy and second, his learning ancient Greek.”[30] While still a teacher atBishop Wordsworth's School, in 1951 Golding began writing a manuscript of the novel initially titledStrangers from Within.[31]
In September 1953, after rejections from seven other publishers, Golding sent a manuscript toFaber and Faber and was initially rejected by their reader, Jan Perkins, who labelled it as "Rubbish & dull. Pointless". However, Golding's book was championed by Charles Monteith, a new editor at the firm. Monteith asked for some changes to the text and the novel was published in September 1954 asLord of the Flies.
After moving in 1958 fromSalisbury to nearbyBowerchalke, Golding met his fellow villager and walking companionJames Lovelock. The two discussed Lovelock'shypothesis, that the living matter of the planet Earth functions like a single organism, and Golding suggested naming this hypothesis afterGaia, the personification of the Earth in Greek mythology, and mother of the Titans.[32] His publishing success made it possible for Golding to resign his teaching post at Bishop Wordsworth's School in 1961, and Golding spent that academic year in the United States as writer-in-residence atHollins College (now Hollins University),[33] nearRoanoke, Virginia.[citation needed]
In 1983, Golding was awarded theNobel Prize for Literature "for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today".[37] It was, according to theOxford Dictionary of National Biography, "an unexpected and even contentious choice".[6]
Golding's first novel,Lord of the Flies (1954; film, 1963 and 1990; play, adapted byNigel Williams, 1995), describes a group of boys stranded on a tropical island descending into a lawless and increasingly wild existence before being rescued.[38]The Inheritors (1955) depicts a tribe of gentle Neanderthals encountering modern humans, who by comparison are deceitful and violent. His 1956 novelPincher Martin records the thoughts of a drowning sailor.Free Fall (1959) explores the question of freedom of choice. The novel's narrator, a World War Two soldier in a German POW Camp, endures interrogation and solitary confinement. After these events and while recollecting the experiences, he looks back over the choices he has made, trying to trace precisely where he lost the freedom to make his own decisions.The Spire (1964) follows the construction (and near collapse) of an impossibly large spire on the top of a medieval cathedral (generally assumed to beSalisbury Cathedral).[39]
Golding's 1967 novel,The Pyramid, consists of three linked stories with a shared setting in a small English town based partly on Marlborough where Golding grew up.The Scorpion God (1971) contains three novellas, the first set in an ancient Egyptian court ("The Scorpion God"); the second describing a prehistoric African hunter-gatherer group ("Clonk, Clonk"); and the third in the court of a Roman emperor ("Envoy Extraordinary"). The last of these, originally published in 1956, was reworked by Golding into a play,The Brass Butterfly, in 1958. From 1971 to 1979, Golding published no novels. After this period he publishedDarkness Visible (1979): a story involving terrorism, paedophilia, and a mysterious figure who survives a fire inthe Blitz and appears to have supernatural powers.
In 1980, Golding publishedRites of Passage, the first of his novels about a voyage to Australia in the early nineteenth century. The novel won theBooker Prize in 1980 and Golding followed this success withClose Quarters (1987) andFire Down Below (1989) to complete his 'sea trilogy', later published as one volume entitledTo the Ends of the Earth. In 1984, he publishedThe Paper Men: an account of the struggles between a novelist and his would-be biographer.[40]
Golding was engaged to Mollie Evans, a woman from Marlborough, who was well liked by both of his parents.[41] However, he broke off the engagement and married Ann Brookfield, an analytical chemist,[42] on 30 September 1939. They had two children: David (born September 1940) and Judith (born July 1945).[6][43]
In 1985, Golding and his wife moved to a house calledTullimaar inPerranarworthal, nearTruro, Cornwall. He died of heart failure eight years later on 19 June 1993, at age 81. Golding's body was buried in the parish churchyard ofBowerchalke near his former home and theWiltshire county border withHampshire andDorset.
Seahorse was written in 1948. It is a biographical account of sailing on the south coast of England in the summer of 1947 and contains a short passage about being in training forD-Day.[48]
Circle Under the Sea is an adventure novel about a writer who sails to discover archaeological treasures off the coast of theScilly Isles.[49]
^Knight, Nini (28 September 1961)."Golding Glad To Be At Hollins".Hollins Columns. Vol. XXXIV, no. 2. Hollins College, Virginia. p. 1. Retrieved8 April 2024.
^Watts, Harold H. (1986). "A View from the Spire: William Golding's Later Novels (review)".MFS Modern Fiction Studies.32 (2):321–322.doi:10.1353/mfs.0.0492.ISSN1080-658X.
^Bufkin, E. C. (1985). "The Nobel Prize and the Paper Men: The Fixing of William Golding".The Georgia Review.39 (1):55–65.
^Harold Bloom (2008).William Golding's Lord of the Flies; Bloom's modern critical interpretations. Infobase Publishing. pp. 161–165.ISBN978-0-7910-9826-4.
^Kendall, Tim (2025).William Golding: The Faber Letters. London: Faber and Faber.ISBN978-0571374427.
^William Golding: The Faber Letters is a book edited byTim Kendall containing a collection of letters between Golding and his editor, Charles Monteith.
Gregor, Ian and Kinkead-Weekes, Mark (1984).William Golding: A Critical Study. 2nd Revised Edition. Faber & Faber.ISBN978-0-571-13259-1
Ladenthin, Volker (1998). Golding, Herr der Fliegen; Verne, 2 Jahre Ferien; Schlüter, Level 4 – Stadt der Kinder. In:Engagement H. 4, pp. 271–274.
McCarron, Kevin (2006).William Golding. 2nd edition. Writers and Their Work. Northcote House Publishers.ISBN978-0-7463-1143-1.
McCarron, Kevin (2007). "From Psychology to Ontology: William Golding's Later Fiction". In: MacKay M., Stonebridge L. (eds.)British Fiction After Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London.doi:10.1057/9780230801394_15.
Schoene-Harwood, B. (2000). "Boys Armed with Sticks: William Golding'sLord of the Flies".Writing Men. Edinburgh University Press.
Tiger, Virginia (1974).William Golding: The Dark Fields of Discovery. Marion Boyars Publishers.ISBN978-0-7145-1012-5.
Tiger, Virginia (2003).William Golding: The Unmoved Target. Marion Boyars Publishers.ISBN978-0-7145-3082-6
