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Born
Golding was born in Saint Columb Minor, a town in Cornwall, England to Alex, a schoolmaster, and Mildred, an active suffragette. Their house was built in the 14 century and sat next to a grave yard -
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"I enjoyed hurting people"
As a kid Golding loved science fiction authors like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. He was keen to writing stories as a child and when he failed at writing a novel at age 12, he flushed his frustrations through bullying his schoolmates. -
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College years and first publication
As a science-turned-English major in the Brasenose college of Oxford University, Golding's collection of poems simply entitled "Poems" was published in 1934. He graduated the next year to pursue the family tradition of becoming a schoolmaster in Salisbury, Wiltshire. -
Starting a family
Golding marries Ann Brookfield. They raise their children David (b. 1940) and Judith (b. 1945) in Cornwall. -
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"I began to see what people were capable of doing"
Golding left Wiltshire to join the military in 1940, serving five years as a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy. During the entirety of the war he witnessed the sinking of the Bismark, fought off enemy planes and submarines, and in the North Atlantic he commanded a rocket launching craft. -
"Lord of the Flies" rejected by 21 publishers
Golding returned to teaching after the war and got back to writing. in this short span of four years he wrote three novels: "The Inheritors" (1955), "Pincher Martin"(1956), and most famously "Lord of the Flies". Golding took LOTF to twenty one publishers until Faber & Faber published his first novel in 1954. He was 43. The hardcover copies sold modestly, and received mixed reviews. -
"Lord of the Flies" goes paperback
It wasn't until Faber & Faber released LOTF as a paperback that the book became famous. The cheaper paperbacks made the book accessible to students. It immediately became a studied book in English classes as critics now viewed it as a scholarly work, "rather than an other adventure story".
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Becoming Sir William Golding
Golding is cemented in literary history due to his industriousness in the 50's, and is named Commander of the British Empire -
Awarded Nobel Prize
At the age of 73, twenty nine years after the release of "Lord of the Flies", Golding receives the Nobel Prize for Literature for the book that has already been a cultural sensation for an entire generation of young people. -
"I'd rather there wasn't and afterlife, really"
Sir William Golding died of a heart attack in in Cornwall, England. A year after his death, a previously completed manuscript entitled "The Double Tongue". In Golding's life he also deviated from fiction and published a book of essays called "A Moving Target" (1982). Golding was an author who had the ability of hyper self examination and awareness. This quality is what pushed him to create portraits encasing the intrinsic truths about human nature in such elaborated detail and precision.