William Golding

Sir William Golding (1911–1993) was an English novelist, playwright, and poet whose dark, allegorical fiction about human nature won him the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in Saint Columb Minor, Cornwall, and grew up in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father taught science at Marlborough Grammar School.

Golding read English literature, after a brief period studying natural science, at Brasenose College, Oxford, graduating in 1934. He published a small volume of Poems the same year, then took up schoolteaching, eventually settling at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Navy, taking part in the pursuit of the German battleship Bismarck and commanding a rocket-launching landing craft at the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.

His first novel, Lord of the Flies, appeared in 1954 after being rejected by numerous publishers, including a Faber reader who dismissed it as "absurd and uninteresting." The book—about English schoolboys descending into savagery on a deserted island—became a fixture of school reading lists in Britain and the United States. He followed it with The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), and The Spire (1964).

Golding won the 1980 Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first volume of his sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth. The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in 1983 for novels that, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition. He was knighted in 1988 and died in Perranarworthal, Cornwall in 1993.

Etymology: William comes from the Old Germanic Wilhelm, combining wil "will" and helm "helmet, protection," giving the sense "resolute protector." It came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066 and has remained one of the most enduring boy names in the English-speaking world, ranking in the US top ten for most of the twentieth century. He carried it through war and into world literature.