William

Gerald Golding

19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993
a British novelist, playwright, and poet
He is an English novelist who in
1983 won the Nobel Prize for
Literature for his parables of the
human condition. He was born
near Newquay, Cornwall,
England. Golding's mother used
to tell him old Cornish ghost
stories from her own childhood.
In 1930 Golding went to
Brasenose College, Oxford,
where he read Natural Sciences
for two years before transferring
to English for his final two
years.
After working in a settlement
house and in small theatre
companies, he became a
schoolmaster at Bishop
Wordsworth’s School in
Salisbury.
He joined the Royal Navy in 1940, took part
in the action that saw the sinking of the
German battleship Bismarck, and
commanded a rocket-launching craft during
the invasion of France in 1944. After the war
he resumed teaching at Bishop
Wordsworth’s until 1961.
Golding was engaged to Molly Evans, a woman from Marlborough, who
was well liked by both of his parents.
However, he broke off the engagement and married Ann Brookfield, an
analytical chemist. They had two children, David (born September, 1940)
and Judith (born July, 1945)
Golding’s first published novel
was Lord of the Flies, the story of
a group of schoolboys isolated on
a tropical island descending into
a lawless and increasingly wild
existence before being rescued.
Its imaginative and brutal
depiction of the rapid and
inevitable dissolution of social
mores aroused widespread
interest. This novel is Golding's
most famous book. Considered a
modern classic, the book is read
in schools around the world
today.
The Inheritors (1955), set The guilt-filled Darkness Visible
in the last days of reflections of a naval (1979) tells the story
Neanderthal man, is officer, his ship of a boy horribly
another story of the torpedoed, who faces burned in the
essential violence and an agonizing death are London blitz during
depravity of human the subject of Pincher World War II.
nature. Martin (1956)
 Writing success
Golding won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
Darkness Visible in 1979.
In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and
was according to the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography "an unexpected and even contentious choice".

In 1988 Golding was appointed a Knight

Bachelor. The title of Knight Bachelor is the
basic rank granted to a man who has been
knighted by the monarch but not inducted
as a member of one of the organised orders
of chivalry; it is a part of the British
honours system.
 In 1980, Golding published Rites of
Passage, the first of his novels about a
voyage to Australia in the early nineteenth
century.
The novel won the Booker Prize in 1980
and Golding followed this success with
Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down
Below (1989) to complete his 'sea trilogy',
later published as one volume entitled To
the Ends of the Earth.
 In 1985, Golding and his wife moved to a house
called Tullimaar in Perranarworthal, near Truro,
Cornwall. He died of heart failure eight years later
on 19 June 1993. His body was buried in the parish
churchyard of Bowerchalke.