About Golding Biography Basics from PBS
Author William Golding
1911 - 1993
Born in Cornwall in 1911, William Golding was educated at Marlborough and Brasenose College, Oxford. He
worked in theatre as a writer, actor and producer before becoming a teacher.
Golding married Ann Brookfield in 1939; their first child, David, was born the following year.
In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy. During World War II, Golding spent time on board various ships and in
other capacities -- he served on board the HMS Galatea in the North Atlantic, as a guard in Liverpool and in
a weapons research unit. He took part in the naval support of the D Day landings, in command of landing
craft vessels.
In 1945, the Goldings' daughter Judith was born and Golding left the Navy to return to teaching.
He achieved commercial success as a writer with the publication in 1954 of Lord of the Flies, a novel he had
originally entitled Strangers from Within. It was an immediate success in both England and in the United
States, achieving "contemporary classic" status. Although he published several more books during the next
few years, it wasn't until 1962 that Golding finally gave up teaching and became a full-time writer.
His celebrity was enhanced when Peter Brook's film of Lord of the Flies was released in 1963. The film was
nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes. (A second version of the novel, starring Balthazar Getty, was
released in 1990.)
In 1980 Rites of Passage, the first of his powerful sea trilogy, was published. It won the Booker McConnell
Prize; in 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In 1987 he published a sequel, Close Quarters. He completed the sea trilogy in 1989 with the final book, Fire
Down Below. He revised the trilogy two years later, when he was eighty years old, to make the single
volume To the Ends of The Earth.
In 1988, when he was seventy-seven, he was knighted. He died of heart failure in 1993 and is buried near
his family home in Wiltshire.
Works by William Golding
Poems
1934
Lord of the Flies
1954
The Inheritors
1955
Pincher Martin
1956
The Brass Butterfly
1958
Free Fall
1959
The Spire
1964
The Hot Gates
1965
The Pyramid
1967
The Scorpion God
1971
Darkness Visible
1979 Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Rites of Passage
1980 Winner of the Booker Prize
A Moving Target
1982
The Paper Men
1984
An Egyptian Journal
1985
Close Quarters
1987
Fire Down Below
1989
To the Ends of the Earth 1991
The Double Tongue
1995