William Golding

By 25graceauwbrey

  • Birth

    Birth
    William Golding was born on September 19, 1911 in St. Columb Minor, England.

  • Education

    Education
    Educated at Marlborough Grammar School, where his father taught. When William was 12, he tried and failed at writing a novel. This lead him to take out his anger by bullying his peers. He later on in life said that looking back now he seemed like a real brat. He went to Brasenose College at Oxford University. His father wanted him to be a scientist, but William wanted to study English literature instead. He graduated in 1935

  • Life as a Teacher

    Life as a Teacher
    After college, William worked in settlement houses for a time. After a while, he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps. In 1935 Golding took a position teaching English and philosophy at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. His experience teaching unruly young boys would later serve as inspiration for his novel Lord of the Flies.

  • Family

    Family
    Golding married Ann Brookfield, an analytical chemist, on 30 September 1939. They had two children, David (born 1940) and Judith (born July, 1945).

  • Navy

    Navy
    Golding spent the better part of the next six years on a boat. While in the Royal Navy, William developed a lifelong romance with sailing and the sea. During World War II, he fought battleships at the sinking of the Bismarck, a german ship, and also fended off submarines and planes. Lieutenant Golding was even placed in command of a rocket-launching craft.

  • First Novel

    First Novel
    In 1954, after 21 rejections, Golding published his first and most acclaimed novel, Lord of the Flies. The novel told the great story of a group of young boys stranded on a deserted island after a plane wreck. Lord of the Flies explored the savage side of human nature as the boys, without society and adults, brutally turned against one another in the face of an imagined enemy.

  • Other Books

    Other Books
    He has also written other books like, The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959). The Spire (1964), The Pyramid (1967), The Scorpion God (1971), Darkness Visible (1979), The Paper Men (1984), To the Ends of the Earth (trilogy), Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), Fire Down Below (1989)
    The Double Tongue (1995), The Hot Gates (1965), A Moving Target (1982) and An Egyptian Journal (1985).

  • Nobel Prize

    Nobel Prize
    At the age of 73, Golding was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1988 he was knighted by England’s Queen Elizabeth II.

  • Movie Version

    Movie Version
    Peter Brook made a film adaptation of the critically acclaimed novel. In 1990 a new film version of the Lord of the Flies was released, bringing the book to the attention of a new generation of readers.

  • Death

    Death
    Golding spent the last few years of his life quietly living with his wife, Ann Brookfield, at their house near Falmouth, Cornwall, where he continued to toil at his writing. The couple had married in 1939 and had two children, David and Judith. On June 19, 1993, Golding died of a heart attack in Perranarworthal, Cornwall. After Golding died, his completed manuscript for The Double Tongue was published posthumously.