William Golding
From Philosopedia
Golding, William [Sir] (19 September - 19 June 1993)
Golding is the English novelist who wrote Lord of the Flies (1954), a book that describes the struggle between good and evil and depicts youngsters who, marooned on a deserted island by a plane crash during a global atomic war, regress into blood-curdling tribal savagery.
Reminiscing about World War II, Golding once said that it had been a turning point for him: “I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.” At another time he said, “Look out, the evil is in us all.”
Golding was born at 47 Mountwise, St. Columb Minor, Newquay, Cornwall, England, at his maternal grandmother's house. Alec Golding, his father who was a bootmaker, was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School from 1905 until his retirement. A socialist and scientific rationalist, he taught where his sons William and Joseph went to school. Their mother, Mildred, was a suffragist. Both parents were atheists.
In 1930 Golding went to Oxford University. In 1939, he married Ann Brookfield, and that had two children, Judy and David.
During World War II, Golding who was in the Royal Navy helped in the pursuit and sinking of Germany's Bismarck, and in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day he commanded a landing ship that fought its way onto the beaches.
Martin Gardner has pointed out two science blunders in Golding’s Lord of the Flies. In the book’s second chapter, Ralph starts a fire by using the spectacles of the myopic Piggy; however, nearsighted (myopic) persons wear lenses that are concave, and only convex lenses can focus sunlight on a small spot. Second, in the fifth chapter Golding writes that the sun has just set, stars have appeared, and a “sliver of moon” is rising above the horizon—a moon rising after sunset, however, has to be full, not crescent-shaped.
After writing The Spire (1964) and The Rites of Passage (1980), Golding in 1983 was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Richard Monte, writing about Golding’s reaction against rationalism, terms Golding “a pessimist and his work as a statement against rationality.” If Sea Trilogy is counted as one, Monte notes that in nine of Golding’s novels “the fallen nature of humanity and hubris predominate. . . . His message is a powerful reminder of the task which faces humanity as it struggles to find ways of living humanely and rationally in a godless universe, where irrational forces and desires are a permanent threat to civilization.” (New Humanist, February, 1994).
“I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller,” Sir William said of his works, adding that he was not entirely a pessimist: “I think good will overcome evil in the end. I don’t know quite how, but I have that simple faith.” As for death, he remarked, “I’d rather there wasn’t an afterlife, really. I’d much rather not be me for thousands of years. Me? Hah!”
Golding died of heart failure and was buried in the village churchyard at Bowerchalke, South Wiltshire.
In 2009 an authorized biography by John Carey, William Golding: The Man Who Wrote 'Lord of the Flies', the novelist is described by The Economist 's critic] as a bully who drank too much, was always remorseful, genuinely modest, and witty at his own expense.
