Question: Which William wrote the novel Lord Of The Flies?
Answer: Golding

Lord of the Flies is a 1954 novel by Nobel Prize-winning English author William Golding about a group of British boys stuck on an uninhabited island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results. Its stances on the already controversial subjects of human nature and individual welfare versus the common good earned it position 68 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1900–1999.

Published in 1954, Lord of the Flies was Golding’s first novel. Although it was not a great success at the time—selling fewer than 3,000 copies in the United States during 1955 before going out of print—it soon went on to become a best-seller.  It has been adapted to film twice in English, in 1963 by Peter Brook and 1990 by Harry Hook, and once in Filipino (1976).

In 2005 the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. It was awarded a place on both lists of Modern Library 100 Best Novels, reaching number 41 on the editor's list, and 25 on the reader's list. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 70 on the BBC's survey The Big Read. 

Background 

The book indicates that it takes place in the midst of an unspecified nuclear war. Some of the marooned characters are ordinary students, while others arrive as a musical choir under an established leader. Most (with the exception of the choirboys and Sam and Eric) appear never to have encountered one another before. The book portrays their descent into savagery; left to themselves in a paradisiacal country, far from modern civilisation, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state.

At an allegorical level, the central theme is the conflicting human impulses toward civilization and social organization—living by rules, peacefully and in harmony—and toward the will to power. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. How these play out, and how different people feel the influences of these, form a major subtext of Lord of the Flies.  The name "Lord of the Flies" is a literal translation of Beelzebub, from .

The novel is a reaction to the youth novel The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne.

Plot 

In the midst of a wartime evacuation, a British plane crashes on or near an isolated island in a remote region of the Pacific Ocean. The only survivors are boys in their middle childhood or preadolescence. Two boys—the fair-haired Ralph and an overweight, bespectacled boy nicknamed "Piggy"—find a conch, which Ralph uses as a horn to call all the survivors to one area. Due largely to the fact that Ralph appears responsible for bringing all the survivors together, he is quickly elected their "chief", though he does not receive the votes of the members of a boys' choir, led by the red-headed Jack Merridew. Ralph asserts three primary goals: to have fun, survive, and to maintain a smoke signal that could alert passing ships to their presence on the island. The boys declare that whoever holds the conch shall also be able to speak at their formal gatherings and receive the attentive silence of the larger group.

Jack organises his choir group into a hunting party responsible for discovering a food source. Ralph, Jack, and a quiet, dreamy boy named Simon soon form a loose triumvirate of leaders. Though he is Ralph's only confidant, Piggy is quickly made into an outcast by his fellow "biguns" (older boys) and becomes an unwilling source of laughs for the other children. Simon, in addition to supervising the project of constructing shelters, feels an instinctive need to protect the "littluns" (younger boys).

The semblance of order quickly deteriorates as the majority of the boys turn idle, giving little aid in building shelters, and begin to develop paranoias about the island, referring to a supposed monster, the "beast", which they believe to exist on the island. Ralph insists that no such beast exists, but Jack, who has started a power struggle with Ralph, gains control of the discussion by boldly promising to kill the beast. At one point, Jack summons all of his hunters to hunt down a wild pig, drawing away those assigned to maintain the signal fire. A ship travels by the island, but without the boys' smoke signal to alert the ship's crew, the ship continues by without stopping. Angered by the failure of the boys to attract potential rescuers, Ralph considers relinquishing his position, but is convinced not to do so by Piggy.

One night, an aerial battle occurs over the island while the boys sleep, during which a fighter pilot ejects from his plane and dies during the descent. His body drifts down to the island in his parachute; both get tangled in a tree near the top of the mountain. Later on, while Jack schemes against Ralph, twins Sam and Eric, now assigned to the maintenance of the signal fire, see the corpse of the fighter pilot and his parachute in the dark. Mistaking the corpse for the beast, they run to the cluster of shelters that Ralph and Simon have erected and warn the others. This unexpected meeting again raises tensions between Jack and Ralph. Shortly thereafter, Jack decides to lead a party to the other side of the island, where a mountain of stones, later called Castle Rock, forms a place where he claims the beast resides. Only Ralph and Jack's sadistic supporter Roger agree to go; Ralph turns back shortly before the other two boys. When they arrive at the shelters, Jack calls an assembly and tries to turn the others against Ralph, asking for them to remove him from his position. Receiving little support, Jack, Roger, and another boy leave the shelters to form their own tribe. This tribe lures in recruits from the main group by providing a feast of cooked pig and its members begin to paint their faces and enact bizarre rituals including sacrifices to the beast.

Simon, who faints frequently and is likely an epileptic,   has a secret hideaway where he goes to be alone.  One day while he is there, Jack and his followers erect a faux sacrifice to the beast nearby: a severed pig's head, mounted on a sharpened stick, and soon swarming with scavenging flies. Simon conducts an imaginary dialog with the head, which he dubs the "Lord of the Flies".  The head mocks Simon's notion that the beast is a real entity, "something you could hunt and kill", and reveals the truth: They, the boys, are the beast; it is inside them all.  The Lord of the Flies also warns Simon that he is in danger, because he represents the soul and spirit of man, and predicts that the others will kill him.  Sure enough, during a ritual dance, the frenzied boys mistake Simon for the beast, attack him, and beat him to death.

Jack and his rebel band decide that the real symbol of power on the island is not the conch, but Piggy's glasses—the only means the boys have of starting a fire.  They raid Ralph's camp, confiscate the glasses, and return to their abode on Castle Rock. Ralph, now deserted by most of his supporters, journeys to Castle Rock to confront Jack and secure the glasses. Taking the conch and accompanied only by Piggy, Sam, and Eric, Ralph finds the tribe and demands that they return the valuable object. Turning against Ralph, the tribe captures Sam and Eric while Roger drops a boulder from his vantage point above, killing Piggy and shattering the conch. Ralph manages to escape, but Sam and Eric are tortured until they agree to join Jack's tribe.

The following morning, Jack orders his tribe to begin a manhunt for Ralph. Jack's savages set fire to the forest while Ralph desperately weighs his options for survival. Following a long chase, most of the island is consumed in flames. With the hunters closely behind him Ralph trips and falls. He looks up at a uniformed adult – a naval officer whose party has landed from a passing warship to investigate the fire. Ralph bursts into tears over the death of Piggy and the "end of innocence".   Jack and the other children, filthy and unkempt, also revert to their true ages and erupt into sobs.  The officer expresses his disappointment at seeing British boys exhibiting such feral, warlike behavior; then turns to stare awkwardly at his own warship.

Adaptations 

There have been these film adaptations:

* Lord of the Flies (1963), directed by Peter Brook
* Alkitrang dugo (1976), a Filipino film, with female cast members
* Lord of the Flies (1990), directed by Harry Hook

Nigel Williams adapted the text for the stage.
It was debuted by the Royal Shakespeare Company in July 1996.
The Pilot Theatre Company has toured it extensively in the United Kingdom and abroad.

In October 2014 it was announced that the 2011 production   of Lord of the Flies would return to conclude the 2015 season at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre ahead of a major UK tour. The production is to be directed by the Artistic Director Timothy Sheader who won the 2014 Whatsonstage.com Awards Best Play Revival for  To Kill A Mockingbird.

In June 2013, BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast a dramatization by Judith Adams in four 30-minute episodes directed by Sasha Yevtushenko.  The cast included Ruth Wilson as "The Narrator", Finn Bennett as "Ralph", Richard Linnel as "Jack", Caspar Hilton-Hilley as "Piggy" and Jack Caine as "Simon".

# Fire on the Mountain
# Painted Faces
# Beast from the Air
# Gift for Darkness

Influence 

Many writers have borrowed plot elements from Lord of the Flies. By the early 1960s, it was required reading in many schools and colleges.

Film

Stephen King's fictional town of Castle Rock, inspired by the fictional mountain fort of the same name in Lord of the Flies, in turn inspired the name of Rob Reiner's production company, Castle Rock Entertainment, which produced the film Lord of the Flies (1990). 

Literature

Stephen King got the name Castle Rock from the fictional mountain fort of the same name in Lord of the Flies and used the name to refer to a fictional town that has appeared in a number of his novels.  The book itself appears prominently in his novels Hearts in Atlantis (1999), Misery (1987), and Cujo (1981).

Stephen King wrote an introduction for a new edition of Lord of the Flies (2011) to mark the centenary of William Golding's birth in 2011.

The novel Garden Lakes by Jaime Clarke is an homage to Lord of the Flies.

Music

The final song on U2's debut album Boy (1980) takes its title, "Shadows and Tall Trees", from Chapter 7 in the book.

Iron Maiden wrote a song inspired by the book, included in their 1995 album The X Factor.

William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies by John Carey | Book review | Books | The Guardian
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William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies by John Carey
A diligent biography of William Golding doesn't fully capture the creative madness of its subject, finds Peter Conrad
William Golding at his Wiltshire home, 1983. Photograph: John Eggitt/ Bettmann/ Corbis
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We hear a lot about the death of the author, but William Golding is an author who was almost still-born. The man who wrote Lord of the Flies found that no one wanted to publish it. In 1953, his manuscript spent seven months being sniffily perused by publishers, who all promptly returned it. The Curtis Brown agency even declined to represent the would-be author, a dispirited schoolmaster who had written the book during classes and given his pupils, in lieu of an education, the humdrum task of totting up the number of words per page. A dead end seemed to have been reached when the Faber reader, picking through pages that were now yellow and grubby from handling, contemptuously rejected the submission as "absurd & uninteresting … rubbish & dull".
Then Charles Monteith, a former lawyer hired as an editor by Faber only a month before, retrieved the book from the bin and persuaded his colleagues to buy it for the piffling sum of £60. As a set text for schools, Lord of the Flies went on to sell millions of copies, introducing adolescents worldwide to the idea of original sin and the knowledge of their own barbarity.
My childhood reading life began, so far as I can recall, with RM Ballantyne's naively imperialist story The Coral Island; my innocence came to an end when I opened Lord of the Flies, which warps Ballantyne's tale into an allegory about the wickedness of our species and its rightful ejection from the happy garden. The novel, as the critic Lionel Trilling said, marked a mutation in culture: God may have died, but the Devil was flourishing, especially in English public schools.
Yet the man who wrote Lord of the Flies spent the rest of his life regretting that he had done so. Golding considered the book "boring and crude", its language "O-level stuff". Its classic status struck him as "a joke" and he disparaged his income from it as "Monopoly money". And what right had it to overshadow later, better books, like his evolutionary saga, The Inheritors, his medieval fable, The Spire, or his solipsistic tragedy, Pincher Martin?
Towards the end of his life, he refused to reread the manuscript (much revised, on Monteith's orders, before publication): he feared he'd be so dismayed he might do himself a mischief. Golding whispered the truth about these protests in his journal. He abominated Lord of the Flies, he confided, because "basically I despise myself and am anxious not to be discovered, uncovered, detected, rumbled". Discovery, uncovery, detection and rumbling are the appointed tasks of the biographer, about which John Carey, in this authorised life of a man he "admired and respected", evidently feels uncomfortable.
Golding called himself a monster. His imagination lodged a horde of demons, buzzing like flies inside his haunted head, and his dreams rehearsed his guilt in scenarios that read like sketches for incidents in his novels, which they often were. After dark, his mother became a murderous maniac, hurling knives, shards of shattered mirror or metal pots of scalding tea at little William; a girlfriend he had cast off returned as a stiffened corpse, which he watched himself trying to bury in the garden. At his finest, Golding paid traumatised tribute to the pain of other creatures, like the hooked octopus he once saw impaled by the "vulnerable, vulvar sensitive flesh" of its pink, screaming mouth, or a rabbit he shot in Cornwall, which stared at him before it fell with "a combination of astonishment and outrage".
But pity didn't prohibit him from firing the shot. He understood the Nazis, he said, because he was "of that sort by nature". His sexual assault on a 15-year-old girl has been titillatingly leaked to publicise Carey's biography. More generally, his son-in-law testifies that Golding specialised in belittling others – if that is, he recognised them at all. As Carey notes, he chronically misspelt names because he couldn't be bothered with people and their pesky claim to exist.
Carey documents Golding's ogre-like antics, but is reluctant to speculate about their origins. "I do not know," he says, "why he thought he was a monster" and he concludes this long, loyal, conscientious book by admitting there may be a primal scene, a hidden obscenity, that still eludes him – "something I have not discovered". Should a biographer, I wonder, accept defeat with such good grace? Carey prefers to deal with the masks the monster wore in public. At times, Golding impersonated a twinkling Cornish pixie; behind the helms of his boats, he pretended to be Captain Hornblower or perhaps, when the role came closer to caricature, Cap'n Birdseye.
His worst rampages occurred when he was drunk. Once, staying at a friend's house in London, Golding awoke in panic and dismembered a Bob Dylan puppet because he thought it was Satan. Carey nervously makes light of the episode, referring to it as a '"diabolic encounter". Religion and rationality, myth and science, fight it out in Golding's books as they did in his brain; it may be that Carey is too sane or puritanical to comprehend the creative madness of his subject.
He is tactful about Golding's relations with his children, both of whom suffered psychological upsets, or with his put-upon wife, who seems to have had her revenge by interrogating him at public lectures; at a gig in Lisbon, her voice from the darkened auditorium demanded to be told why there weren't more women in his books. Carey, a battle-scarred class warrior whose books include The Intellectuals and the Masses, sympathises with the young Golding's embarrassments at Oxford, where interviewers wrote him off as "not quite a gentleman". He's strangely reticent, however, about the old man's desperation to gain admission to the establishment. Golding pestered well-placed acquaintances to nominate him for a knighthood, which he called "Kultivating my K", and when it was finally doled out he changed the name on his passport with indecent alacrity and began to take pleasure in the sycophancy of hotel managers and head waiters.
The self-contempt that Golding defined as the clue to his character pays dividends for Carey the textual scholar, who here unearths a series of early drafts for published novels or extracts from projects unjustifiably abandoned – a "magnificent" but unfinished work of Homeric science fiction, a memoir that was self-censored because too raw, a film script about a traffic jam that rehearses the Apocalypse, a first version of The Inheritors that "cries out to be published as a novel in its own right" and a segment excised from Darkness Visible that is also "a masterpiece crying out for publication".
I suspect the cry Carey hears is that of unborn infants begging him to deliver them into the light and I hope he will do so. As a biographer, he may not have uncovered Golding's darkest, deepest secrets, but at least his detective work has grubbed up these intriguing, revealing relics. The man who wrote Lord of the Flies indeed wrote better things, some of which the rest of us should be given the chance to read.

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SparkNotes: Lord of the Flies: Key Facts
Lord of the Flies
full title  ·  Lord of the Flies
author  · William Golding
genre  · Allegory; adventure story; castaway fiction; loss-of-innocence fiction
language  · English
time and place written  · Early 1950s; Salisbury, England
date of first publication  · 1954
publisher  · Faber and Faber
narrator  · The story is told by an anonymous third-person narrator who conveys the events of the novel without commenting on the action or intruding into the story.
point of view  · The narrator speaks in the third person, primarily focusing on Ralph’s point of view but following Jack and Simon in certain episodes. The narrator is omniscient and gives us access to the characters’ inner thoughts.
tone  · Dark; violent; pessimistic; tragic; unsparing
tense  · Immediate past
setting (place)  · A deserted tropical island
protagonist  · Ralph
major conflict · Free from the rules that adult society formerly imposed on them, the boys marooned on the island struggle with the conflicting human instincts that exist within each of them—the instinct to work toward civilization and order and the instinct to descend into savagery, violence, and chaos.
rising action · The boys assemble on the beach. In the election for leader, Ralph defeats Jack, who is furious when he loses. As the boys explore the island, tension grows between Jack, who is interested only in hunting, and Ralph, who believes most of the boys’ efforts should go toward building shelters and maintaining a signal fire. When rumors surface that there is some sort of beast living on the island, the boys grow fearful, and the group begins to divide into two camps supporting Ralph and Jack, respectively. Ultimately, Jack forms a new tribe altogether, fully immersing himself in the savagery of the hunt.
climax  · Simon encounters the Lord of the Flies in the forest glade and realizes that the beast is not a physical entity but rather something that exists within each boy on the island. When Simon tries to approach the other boys and convey this message to them, they fall on him and kill him savagely.
falling action · Virtually all the boys on the island abandon Ralph and Piggy and descend further into savagery and chaos. When the other boys kill Piggy and destroy the conch shell, Ralph flees from Jack’s tribe and encounters the naval officer on the beach.
themes  · Civilization vs. savagery; the loss of innocence; innate human evil
motifs  · Biblical parallels; natural beauty; the bullying of the weak by the strong; the outward trappings of savagery (face paint, spears, totems, chants)
symbols  · The conch shell; Piggy’s glasses; the signal fire; the beast; the Lord of the Flies; Ralph, Piggy, Jack, Simon, and Roger
foreshadowing  · The rolling of the boulders off the Castle Rock in Chapter 6 foreshadows Piggy’s death; the Lord of the Flies’s promise to have some “fun” with Simon foreshadows Simon’s death
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Review of John Carey, William Golding: The man who wrote Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Review of John Carey, William Golding: The man who wrote Lord of the Flies
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Review of John Carey, William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (Faber and Faber, paperback, 2010).
When reading John Carey’s absorbing biography of William Golding, one is struck by the sheer amount of material that survives in the Golding archive.  As a researcher, it is easy to imagine Carey’s delight to have access to such an eclectic, important, and to date, uncatalogued collection.  Writing a literary biography can often be a fraught and complicated process; the biographer may face opposition from the subject’s estate, fail to gain permission to quote extensively from the original works, or even face opposition from the subject themselves.
One of the most famous examples of this is Ian Hamilton’s lengthy pursuit of the reclusive J.D. Salinger, which led to Salinger unsuccessfully attempting to block publication of the book.  My own research examines the work of the poet Sylvia Plath, about whom countless biographies and memoirs have appeared, the majority of which (some, quite rightly so) have not been allowed to quote fully from Plath’s work and several of which have faced legal challenges from the Plath estate.  Even the biography that is considered ‘approved’ by the Plath estate (although unofficially) is mired in controversy.  William Golding himself explored literary biography in his novel The Paper Men, which features a young professor Rick Tucker desperate to write the biography of writer Wilfred Barclay.  Tucker is determined to get his hands on Barclay’s private papers, and Barclay appears to be just as determined in eluding him, leading to a pursuit around Europe and a fatal ending.
Fortunately, Carey had no such concerns while undertaking his research, and the finished product is exemplary in its use of archival material and reminiscences. He had access to Golding’s journals, letters, unpublished manuscripts and support from Golding’s friends and family. The material is brilliantly handled and assimilated by Carey, and crucially, he allows Golding’s words to speak for themselves, refusing even to correct Golding’s poor spelling. This is in direct response to Golding’s journal entry in 1982: ‘it’s a moody-making thought…that some bugger will either silently correct my spelling, or even worse, interrupt the text with brackets and sic in italics. But my bad grammar and bad spelling was me’ (x).
Every aspect of Golding’s life is explored chronologically, from his early childhood split between Cornwall and Wiltshire, through to his career as a schoolmaster, marriage and family and finally, life as a writer. Carey does not shy away from revealing details about Golding that portray him as a negative character; for example we learn that he made an attempt to rape a girlfriend in his teens, that his relationship with his son was often difficult, and that his dependence on alcohol caused numerous problems with his family and friends. We also gain a portrait of an immensely clever man, whose desire to write could not be silenced, and a writer who challenged literary conventions, often in defiance of previous criticism of his work. Golding was awarded the James Tait Black Prize, the Booker Prize, the Nobel Prize and a knighthood; and he was the recipient of these accolades despite being described by Oxford dons as ‘not quite a gent’ (57). Indeed, the biography is also a fascinating read as an example of the class boundaries in England in the twentieth century.
The chapters that discuss the writing and development of his many books are of immense interest. Of course, Golding remains most famous for his first novel Lord of the Flies, but this is to the detriment of his many other works which are always strikingly original and, in many cases, defy categorisation because of their depth and brilliance. Nonetheless, the story of how one of the most-read novels of the twentieth century was rejected by so many publishers and was only rescued at Faber & Faber by a young editor, Charles Monteith, is as unbelievable as it is fascinating. Lord of the Flies was well received in England after its publication in 1954 but went out of print in the United States. However, by the early 1960s the book had become a phenomenal success and required reading in many schools and colleges, as it still is today.  Carey guides us through the euphoria of the acceptance of Lord of the Flies but also shows us the burden that the success of the book had imposed on Golding. As Carey writes, ‘Golding [had] complicated and resentful feelings about his first book’s enormous success, which had dwarfed everything he wrote afterwards’ (363).
The chapter that I found most useful as a companion to one of Golding’s novels was the one on Pincher Martin, written around 1956. The book is truly a work of genius, and in fact the reader does not recognise just how tremendous the book is until they reach the final page. Even then, the reader needs to turn back to the beginning and start all over again to fully appreciate, as Frank Kermode put it, the novel’s ‘dense interweavings of image and reference’ (201).  Reading about the development of Golding’s plot and his understanding of the main character is crucial for any reader of Pincher Martin.
John Carey’s William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies is a remarkable achievement. It should be essential reading for anyone interested in Golding’s work and in twentieth century literature. For those readers who have read only Lord of the Flies this book is a great introduction to the others, but, of course, no substitute for the novels themselves. One hopes that the publication of this biography will stimulate more interest in the work of this hugely original and successful writer.
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William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies | Book review | Books | The Guardian
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To those who've read the other novels (including the marvellous The Inheritors), the subtitle will seem superfluous. And William Golding himself might have been irritated by it, since he came to dislike Lord of the Flies: "boring and crude. The language is O-level stuff" was his verdict when he reread it 20 years after publication. Still, some sort of nudge seems to be necessary. Despite huge public acclaim during his lifetime – the Nobel, the Booker, a knighthood and millions of copies sold – Golding is remembered chiefly for one book, and even that one sometimes gets muddled (Princess Margaret's husband Anthony Armstrong-Jones once told Golding how much he admired Lord of the Rings).
Many studies exist interpreting his work, but no Life has appeared in the 16 years since his death and any biographer looked certain to face a struggle. A private, monogamous, bearded ex-teacher who lived quietly in south-west England and set most of his novels in the past: how much was there to say? As it turns out, a considerable amount: John Carey's book isn't sensationalist but it discloses sufficient deviance to explain Golding's description of himself in a private journal as "a monster in deed, word and thought". Sexual violence, alcoholic excess, shame, depression and vanity are all part of the story. Even the beard turns out to be interesting.
One revelation has already made the news pages – Golding's attempted rape, while an undergraduate at Oxford, of a 15-year-old girlfriend, Dora, and a bizarre episode, a year later, when she enticed him to have sex with her in a field above a school playing field, so that his father could spot them in flagrante through a pair of binoculars. By this point Dora was also involved with a games master who liked to whip her, and Golding found the sight of her whipped bottom "loathsomely exciting". In an unpublished book called Men, Women & Now, he recalls Dora's "depraved" nature with misogynistic venom – not just to appease his guilt over the attempted rape but because she taught him about his capacity for sadism.
There's nothing to suggest he was a sadistic child, but he was certainly a sensitive one, fearful of his mother's temper (she occasionally threw things) and prone to nightmares. His parents were socialist, pacifist, atheist, teetotal and musical. Golding later regretted their lack of warmth, but he inherited their hatred of the class system. He knew it from Marlborough, a town divided between the posh school and the local one, and re-experienced it at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he was the only grammar-school boy among 71 entrants. He graduated with an indifferent degree, ran up debts which he didn't repay for more than 20 years, and when interviewed by the university's appointments committee, for careers advice, was marked down as "Not Quite" ("not quite a gentleman") and NTS ("Not Top Shelf").
Teaching was the obvious career, but for several years Golding drifted, writing poetry, playing the piano and acting. He also met his wife Ann: bright, beautiful, sporty and fiercely Marxist, though marrying her meant ditching his fiancée – more cause for self-recrimination. Then came the war. "I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature," Golding said, and it could be argued that going to war against them was the making of him, or at any rate the making of Lord of the Flies. His experiences in the navy were a mixture of courage, intelligence and frightening incompetence, and Carey describes them in fascinating detail. The low point was an accident with a detonator that put him in hospital for three months, the high point successfully commanding a craft during the D-Day landings – though what he saw that day ("ships mined, ships blowing up into a Christmas tree of exploding ammunition, ships burning, sinking") scarred him for life.
Back home he finally settled into a teaching job in Salisbury. To those who knew him he seemed a changed man, brooding and withdrawn. He had grown a beard while a naval officer, and having shaved it off when demobbed now grew it again, as though more comfortable showing less of his face to the world. It marked him out as a disgruntled outsider (a forerunner of beatniks) and ascetic seafarer ("a cross between Captain Hornblower and Saint Augustine", as Michael Ayrton put it). His pupils nicknamed him Scruff and found him less than diligent: he'd set them work to get on with while he furtively scribbled in a notebook. It was known that he had literary aspirations, but few on the staff thought they'd come to anything. His first three books were all turned down.
To begin with he had no better luck with Lord of the Flies. Dog-eared after its rejections by other publishers, the typescript (provisional title: Strangers from Within) eventually reached Faber, whose reader, Polly Perkins, dismissed it as an "absurd & uninteresting fantasy" and consigned it to the slush pile. It was rescued by a new recruit at Faber, Charles Monteith, who could see it had potential, provided Golding would agree to major cuts and rewrites. Thus began a 40-year relationship as crucial as Scott Fitzgerald's with Max Perkins or Raymond Carver's with Gordon Lish. "I am quite convinced I never wrote it. It's much bigger than I am," a grateful Golding said when the novel came out, and Monteith played midwife to every book that followed, easing his author's prenatal fears and birth-pains. But for him Golding would probably have died an unknown schoolteacher.
As it was, he didn't give up the day job until the early 1960s, when success in America gave him the wherewithal. In the meantime, as well as writing fiction, he had a play on in the West End, wrote book reviews and travel articles and appeared on the BBC's discussion programme The Brains Trust. Adulation did little to turn his head (only once did Ann suspect him of straying, with the scholar Virginia Tiger, and her suspicions seem to have been groundless), but nor did it boost his confidence: he continued to fret that he'd be outed as a fraud. In private he could be wry and funny, but most of his public utterances make Samuel Beckett sound like a cock-eyed optimist. Being human was "one long nightmare", he said, and nuclear war would only be avoided because man – "this monstrous creature, this biological irrelevance" – was too scared to destroy himself.
Heavy boozing didn't help Golding's frame of mind: when drunk, he insulted people and abused Ann, and there were many morning-after bouts of self-loathing. He also worried a lot about money, especially after making heaps of it. A pompous letter written to the Society of Authors is unendearing enough ("It has been borne in on me more and more, recently, that I have a considerable reputation in the literary world; and yet the fees I obtain from the BBC are much as they were"), but he caps it when comparing the "grief" of writing a cheque to the Inland Revenue for £52,000 to the loss of his closest friends. He paid his gardeners badly – and once refrained from wind-surfing on holiday in Goa because he thought £3.50 an hour too expensive. As Carey says, over-generosity wasn't among his faults.
Yet he had good friendships, enjoyed a happy marriage, and was a devoted father, despite berating himself for mistreating his son David in infancy. There were many family trips and adventures, including a near-catastrophe in the English Channel when his boat was struck and sunk by a Japanese freighter. He never sailed again but didn't lack for other interests, archaeology, horse-riding, chess, ponds and orchid-growing among them. Unimpressed by distinctions between "high" and "low", he was as happy watching snooker on TV as composing Latin elegiac couplets. His intellectual curiosity was matched by his physical energy. The day before he died at 81 he was up a ladder unblocking a drainpipe.
As a long-time admirer of Golding, Carey can't have believed his luck when given access to a family archive containing several unpublished novels, two autobiographies, and a 5,000-page private journal. His plot synopses are fuller than some readers might care for, but he always makes connections with the life. Even the extensive summarising of reviews seems justified, since Golding was, by his own admission, "revoltingly" dependent on what people thought of his work. No biography would or could ever reach the root of his character, he thought, but this one goes a long way, with due measure of praise and blame, and an unwavering interest in every book he wrote, not just the most famous one.
Blake Morrison's South of the River is published by Vintage.

Why did William Golding write his novel, Lord of the Flies? | eNotes
Why did William Golding write his novel, Lord of the Flies?
mwestwood | College Teacher | (Level 3) Distinguished Educator
Posted on
March 11, 2012 at 12:59 PM
After his experience of the horrors of war, an experienced writer named William Golding described as "one had one's nose rubbed in the human condition" returned to teaching and philosophy.  However, Golding rejected the rationalism of his father and began his doubts regarding human nature. 
After reading at night to his small children R.M. Ballatyne's adventure story, The Coral Island  in which well-groomed civilized British boys defeat the savage natives on an island where they are stranded, Golding wondered out loud to his wife whether it would be a good idea to write another story as an allegory that is similar, but the characters "behave as they really would." His wife agreed, encouraging him to write what became his greatest work.  An allegory of man, Golding's  Lord of the Flies presents the evil that man is capable of by nature.
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mizzwillie | Middle School Teacher | (Level 1) Senior Educator
Posted on
March 11, 2012 at 7:18 AM
William Golding, the author of the novel Lord of the Flies, was in combat in World War II which had a huge influence on his views about life.  He was present at the sinking of the prize German warship the Bismarck, participated in D-Day, and was horrified at the destruction of Britain by the German air force bombs.  In the 1950's, a nuclear war seemed like a real possibility with all of the tension among major countries.  It was in this atmosphere and this fear of another war that Golding wrote his book.  If you think of his background and tie that into the book, it isn't surprising that his novel is dark, that the boys turn to evil, and the ending is uncertain. Golding wants the reading public to question war, to see the horror it brings and to see what it does to the people involved.
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Lord of the Flies: Lord of the Flies Book Summary & Study Guide | CliffsNotes
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Lord of the Flies explores the dark side of humanity, the savagery that underlies even the most civilized human beings. William Golding intended this novel as a tragic parody of children's adventure tales, illustrating humankind's intrinsic evil nature. He presents the reader with a chronology of events leading a group of young boys from hope to disaster as they attempt to survive their uncivilized, unsupervised, isolated environment until rescued.
In the midst of a nuclear war, a group of British boys find themselves stranded without adult supervision on a tropical island. The group is roughly divided into the "littluns," boys around the age of six, and the "biguns," who are between the ages of ten and twelve. Initially, the boys attempt to form a culture similar to the one they left behind. They elect a leader, Ralph , who, with the advice and support of Piggy (the intellectual of the group), strives to establish rules for housing and sanitation. Ralph also makes a signal fire the group's first priority, hoping that a passing ship will see the smoke signal and rescue them. A major challenge to Ralph's leadership is Jack , who also wants to lead. Jack commands a group of choirboys-turned-hunters who sacrifice the duty of tending the fire so that they can participate in the hunts. Jack draws the other boys slowly away from Ralph's influence because of their natural attraction to and inclination toward the adventurous hunting activities symbolizing violence and evil.
The conflict between Jack and Ralph — and the forces of savagery and civilization that they represent — is exacerbated by the boys' literal fear of a mythical beast roaming the island. One night, an aerial battle occurs above the island, and a casualty of the battle floats down with his opened parachute, ultimately coming to rest on the mountaintop. Breezes occasionally inflate the parachute, making the body appear to sit up and then sink forward again. This sight panics the boys as they mistake the dead body for the beast they fear. In a reaction to this panic, Jack forms a splinter group that is eventually joined by all but a few of the boys. The boys who join Jack are enticed by the protection Jack's ferocity seems to provide, as well as by the prospect of playing the role of savages: putting on camouflaging face paint, hunting, and performing ritualistic tribal dances. Eventually, Jack's group actually slaughters a sow and, as an offering to the beast, puts the sow's head on a stick.
Of all the boys, only the mystic Simon has the courage to discover the true identity of the beast sighted on the mountain. After witnessing the death of the sow and the gift made of her head to the beast, Simon begins to hallucinate, and the staked sow's head becomes the Lord of the Flies, imparting to Simon what he has already suspected: The beast is not an animal on the loose but is hidden in each boy's psyche. Weakened by his horrific vision, Simon loses consciousness.
Recovering later that evening, he struggles to the mountaintop and finds that the beast is only a dead pilot/soldier. Attempting to bring the news to the other boys, he stumbles into the tribal frenzy of their dance. Perceiving him as the beast, the boys beat him to death.
Soon only three of the older boys, including Piggy, are still in Ralph's camp. Jack's group steals Piggy's glasses to start its cooking fires, leaving Ralph unable to maintain his signal fire. When Ralph and his small group approach Jack's tribe to request the return of the glasses, one of Jack's hunters releases a huge boulder on Piggy, killing him. The tribe captures the other two biguns prisoners, leaving Ralph on his own.
The tribe undertakes a manhunt to track down and kill Ralph, and they start a fire to smoke him out of one of his hiding places, creating an island-wide forest fire. A passing ship sees the smoke from the fire, and a British naval officer arrives on the beach just in time to save Ralph from certain death at the hands of the schoolboys turned savages.