Transcript Life of William Golding

 Born 19 September 1911 – Died 19 June 1993
 He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1983
 He attended Oxford for five years
 Lord of the Flies was his first book to be published.
 Imagine a man who embraced solitude as a child but who became famous for writing about
group dynamics. Imagine a man who enjoyed the benefits of a peaceful adolescence, complete
with private schooling, but who spent his adult years writing about the inherent violent nature of
humans. Imagine a man who was groomed by his parents to be a scientist but who ended up as
one of the greatest writers of his time. Imagine William Golding. Raised by educated parents who
supported rational thought, Golding used his experiences from World War II to create novels of
dark human action. Nothing in Golding’s past suggests that he should become the foremost
author of the twentieth century to write about the conflict between barbaric human nature and
civil reasoning; his novels, however, continue to entertain and raise those same questions today
 During World War II, Golding
served in the Royal Navy in
command of a rocket ship. His
active service included
involvement in the sinking of the
German battleship Bismarck in
1940 and participating in the
Normandy invasion. In 1945,
Golding returned to writing and
teaching, with a dark view of the
European civilization. Recalling
later his war experiences, he
remarked that "man produces evil,
as a bee produces honey."
 I Feel William Golding got the idea
for “Lord of the Flies” from a story
he heard from being in the Navy.
Or he put his own spin off of some
story he heard in the service. I
think he got the idea from a ship
that sunk and he thought what if
there were kids on this ship and
they survived and how they would
go about life. But he made human
nature happen at an excelled rate
and in a more dramatic way.
 During his five-year military career,
Golding was a participant in both
the sinking of the great German
battleship, the Bismarck, and in the
allied invasion of Normandy.
 Golding’s most famous novel, The
Lord of the Flies, was originally
titled The Strangers Within and
was published twenty-nine years
before he won the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
 Lord of the Flies was rejected by
twenty-one publishers before
acceptance by Faber and Faber.
 One of Golding’s hobbies was
researching and exploring the
myth of the Loch Ness monster.
 Golding was knighted by Queen
Elizabeth II in 1988.
 He was a commander of a British
Royal Rocket ship.