GOLDING, William

“The greatest ideas are the simplest.”

William Gerald Golding was educated at Marlborough and went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1930 to study sciences.  Fortunately after two years he switched to English Literature.  He graduated in 1934 and in the same year published his first book of verse, simply entitled Poems.  Golding chose to make teaching his profession, a vocation about which he was passionate.  In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and was involved with the chasing and sinking of the Bismark and the Normandy Invasion.  What he witnessed left him with a profound sense of man’s inhumanity to man.  He later remarked that "man produces evil, as a bee produces honey."  After the war he returned to teaching where his interaction with unruly young boys undoubtedly influenced his best known novel, Lord of the Flies.  Published in 1954 this pessimistic view of human nature shows a world in which man is inherently corruptible and wicked, and that once the rule of law is removed man returns to a state that is “nasty, brutish and short.”  Since its publication the novel has become a modern classic, and is studied in classrooms around the world.  With the successful publication of further novels, Golding was able to retire from teaching and concentrate on his writing.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 "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". 

While Golding was mainly a novelist, his body of work also includes poetry, plays, essays and short stories, and we frequently stock first editions of these publications.

Please scroll down to see our current stock of Golding's works, including rare first editions and proof copies.