page_title: William Golding
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: William Golding / Biography / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Blue Plaque at Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury to commemorate author William Golding's service there as a teacher
context_page_description: Sir William Gerald Golding, CBE FRSL was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies, he would go on to publish another eleven novels in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983.
  As a result of his contributions to literature, Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
context_section_description: William Golding was born in his maternal grandmother's house, 47 Mount Wise, Newquay, Cornwall. The house was known as Karenza, the Cornish language word for love, and he spent many childhood holidays there. He grew up in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father (Alec Golding) was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement), the school the young Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended.  His mother, Mildred (Curnoe), kept house at 29, The Green, Marlborough, and was a campaigner for female suffrage. Golding's mother, who was Cornish and whom he considered "a superstitious celt", used to tell him old Cornish fairy tales from her own childhood. In 1930 Golding went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read Natural Sciences for two years before transferring to English Literature. His original tutor was the chemist Thomas Taylor. In a private journal and in a memoir for his wife, Golding recounted his attempted rape of a 15-year-old girl when he was 18 and on his first holiday from Oxford.
  Golding took his B.A. degree with Second Class Honours in the summer of 1934, and later that year a book of his Poems was published by Macmillan & Co, with the help of his Oxford friend, the anthroposophist Adam Bittleston.
  He was a schoolmaster teaching English and music at Maidstone Grammar School 1938 - 1940 and then teaching Philosophy and English in 1939, then just English from 1945 to 1962 at Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury, Wiltshire.
  John Carey, the emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford university, was given access to a personal journal kept by Golding in order to write his biography, in which Golding describes trying to set up his students against each other during his teaching years, which gave him inspiration for his first novel.
caption: Plaque at Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury.
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