Golding, William 1911–1993

(William Gerald Golding)

PERSONAL: Born September 19, 1911, in St. Columb Minor, Cornwall, England; died of a heart attack June 19, 1993, in Perranarworthal, near Falmouth, England; son of Alex A. (a schoolmaster) and Mildred A. Golding; married Ann Brookfield, 1939; children: David, Judith. Education: Brasenose College, Oxford, B.A., 1935, M.A., 1960. Hobbies and other interests: Sailing, archaeology, and playing the piano, violin, viola, cello, and oboe.

CAREER: Writer. Worked in a settlement house, c. 1935; Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, teacher of English and philosophy, 1939–40, 1945–61; actor, producer, and writer, 1934–40, 1945–54. Writer-in-residence, Hollins College, 1961–62; honorary fellow, Brasenose College, Oxford, 1966. Military service: British Royal Navy, 1940–45; became rocket ship commander.

MEMBER: Royal Society of Literature (fellow), Saville Club.

AWARDS, HONORS: Commander, Order of the British Empire, 1965; D.Litt., University of Sussex, 1970, University of Kent, 1974, University of Warwick, 1981, Oxford University, 1983, and University of Sorbonne, 1983; James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1980, for Darkness Visible; Booker-McConnell Prize, 1981, for Rites of Passage; Nobel Prize for literature, 1983, for body of work; LL.D., University of Bristol, 1984; knighted, 1988.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

Lord of the Flies (also see below), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1954, introduction by E.M. Forster, Coward (New York, NY), 1955, reprinted, Berkley (New York, NY), 2003.

The Inheritors, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1955, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1962.

Pincher Martin, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1955, new edition, 1972, published as The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1957.

(With John Wyndham and Mervyn Peake) Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination, Eyre & Spottis-woode (London, England), 1956, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1957.

Free Fall, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1959, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1960.

The Spire, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1964.

The Pyramid (novellas), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1967.

The Scorpion God: Three Short Novels (includes Clonk Clonk, Envoy Extraordinary [also see below], and The Scorpion God), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1971.

Darkness Visible, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1979.

Rites of Passage (first novel in trilogy), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1980.

The Paper Men, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1984.

Close Quarters (second novel in trilogy), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1987.

Fire down Below (third novel in trilogy), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1989.

The Double Tongue: A Draft of a Novel, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1995.

OTHER

Poems, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1934.

The Brass Butterfly: A Play in Three Acts (based on Envoy Extraordinary; first produced in Oxford, then London, England, 1958; produced in New York, NY, 1965), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1958, new edition with introduction by Golding, 1963.

Break My Heart (radio play), BBC Radio, 1962.

Lord of the Flies (screenplay; adapted from his novel), Two Arts/Continental, 1963.

The Hot Gates, and Other Occasional Pieces (nonfiction), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1965.

A Moving Target (essays and lectures), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1982.

Nobel Lecture, 7 December 1983, Sixth Chamber (Leamington Spa, England), 1984.

An Egyptian Journal (travel), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1985.

Also author of radio plays. Contributor to periodicals, including Encounter, Holiday, Listener, New Left Review, and Spectator.

ADAPTATIONS: Pincher Martin was produced as a radio play by the British Broadcasting Corp., 1958. A new screenplay of the novel Lord of the Flies was filmed by Castle Rock Entertainment, 1990, and it was adapted for the stage by Nigel Williams, 1996.

SIDELIGHTS: William Golding has been described as pessimistic, mythical, spiritual: an allegorist who used his novels as a canvas to paint portraits of man's constant struggle between his civilized self and his hidden, darker nature. With the appearance of Lord of the Flies, Golding's first published novel, the author began his career as both a campus cult favorite and one of the late twentieth century's distinctive—and much debated—literary talents. Golding's appeal was summarized by the Nobel Prize committee, which while awarding him its literature prize in 1983 stated that Golding's "books are very entertaining and exciting. They can be read with pleasure and profit without the need to make much effort with learning or acumen. But they have also aroused an unusually great interest in professional literary critics [who find] deep strata of ambiguity and complication in Golding's work,… in which odd people are tempted to reach beyond their limits, thereby being bared to the very marrow."

The novel that established Golding's reputation, Lord of the Flies, was rejected by twenty-one publishers before London-based Faber & Faber accepted the forty-three-year-old schoolmaster's book. While the story has been compared to such works as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica, Golding's novel is actually the author's "answer" to nineteenth-century writer R.M. Ballantyne's children's classic The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean. These two books share the same basic plot line and even some of the same character names; two of the lead characters are named Ralph and Jack in both books. The similarity, however, ends there. Ballantyne's story about a trio of boys stranded on an otherwise uninhabited island shows how, by pluck and resourcefulness, the young castaways survive with their morals strengthened and their wits sharpened. Lord of the Flies, on the other hand, is "an allegory on human society [a century later], the novel's primary implication being that what we have come to call civilization is, at best, not more than skin-deep," James Stern explained in the New York Times Book Review.

Initially, the tale of a group of schoolboys stranded on an island during their escape from atomic war received mixed reviews and sold only modestly in its hardcover edition. But when the paperback edition was published in 1959, the book was made more accessible to students and began to sell briskly. Teachers, aware of student interest and impressed by the strong theme and stark symbolism of the work, assigned Lord of the Flies to literature classes. As the novel's reputation grew, critics reacted by drawing scholarly theses out of what was previously dismissed as just another adventure story.

In his study The Tragic Past, David Anderson discerned biblical implications in Golding's novel. "Lord of the Flies," wrote Anderson, "is a complex version of the story of Cain—the man whose smoke-signal failed and who murdered his brother. Above all, it is a refutation of optimistic theologies which believed that God had created a world in which man's moral development had advanced pari passu with his biological evolution and would continue so to advance until the all-justifying End was reached." Lord of the Flies presents moral regression rather than achievement, Anderson argued. "And there is no all-justifying End," the critic continued, "the rescue-party which takes the boys off their island comes from a world in which regression has occurred on a gigantic scale—the scale of atomic war. The human plight is presented in terms which are unqualified and unrelieved. Cain is not merely our remote ancestor: he is contemporary man, and his murderous impulses are equipped with unlimited destructive power."

The novel has also been interpreted as Golding's response to the popular artistic notion of the 1950s: that youth is a basically innocent collective whose members are victims of adult society. In his 1960 review for Critical Quarterly, C.B. Cox deemed Lord of the Flies "probably the most important novel to be published" during the 1950s. As the critic continued: "[To] succeed, a good story needs more than sudden deaths, a terrifying chase and an unexpected conclusion. Lord of the Flies includes all these ingredients, but their exceptional force derives from Golding's faith that every detail of human life has a religious significance. This is one reason why he is unique among new writers in the '50s…. Golding's intense conviction [is] that every particular of human life has a profound importance. His children are not juvenile delinquents, but human beings realising for themselves the beauty and horror of life."

Golding took his theme of tracing the defects of society back to the defects of human nature a step further with his second novel, The Inheritors. This tale is set at the beginning of human existence itself, during the prehistoric age. A tribe of Neanderthals, as seen through the characters of Lok and Fa, live a peaceful, primitive life. Their happy world, however, is doomed: evolution brings in its wake the new race, Homo sapiens, who demonstrate their acquired skills with weapons by killing the Neanderthals.

The Inheritors, which Golding called his favorite, was well received by several critics. Inevitably, comparisons were also made between The Inheritors and Lord of the Flies. To Peter Green, in Review of English Literature, for example, "it is clear that there is a close thematic connection between [the two novels]: Mr. Golding has simply set up a different working model to illustrate the eternal human verities from a new angle. Again it is humanity, and humanity alone, that generates evil; and when the new men triumph, Lok, the Neanderthaler, weeps as Ralph wept for the corruption and end of innocence" in Lord of the Flies. Reviewer Bernard Old-sey, quoted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, saw the comparison in religious terms, noting that the Homo sapiens "represent the Descent of Man, not simply in the Darwinian sense, but in the Biblical sense of the Fall. Peculiarly enough, the boys [in Lord of the Flies] slide backward, through their own bedevilment, toward perdition; and Lok's Neanderthal tribe hunches forward, given a push by their Homo sapiens antagonists, toward the same perdition. In Golding's view, there is precious little room for evolutionary slippage: progression in The Inheritors and retrogression in Lord of the Flies have the same results."

Just as Lord of the Flies was a revisioning of The Coral Island, Golding claimed he wrote The Inheritors to refute H.G. Wells's controversial sociological study Outline of History. Readers familiar with both works "can see that between the two writers there is a certain filial relation, though strained," commented a Times Literary Supplement critic. "They share the same fascination with past and future, the extraordinary capacity to move imaginatively to remote points in time, the fabulizing impulse, the need to moralize. There are even similarities in style. And surely now, when Wells's reputation as a great writer is beginning to take form, it will be understood as high praise of Golding if one says that he is our Wells, as good in his own individual way as Wells was in his." Taken together, Golding's first two novels are, according to Lawrence R. Ries in Wolf Masks: Violence in Contemporary Fiction, "studies in human nature, exposing the kinds of violence that man uses against his fellow man."

Golding's third novel, Pincher Martin—published in the United States as The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin due to its publishers' concern that U.S. readers would not know that "pincher" is British slang for "petty thief"—found the author moving away from his examination of primitive human nature. Stylistically similar to Ambrose Bierce's famous short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," Pincher Martin is about a naval officer who, after his ship is torpedoed in the Atlantic, drifts aimlessly before latching on to a barren rock. Here he clings for days, eating sea anemones and trying his best to retain consciousness. Delirium overtakes him, though, and through his rambling thoughts he relives his past. The discovery of the sailor's corpse at the end of the story in part constitutes what has been called a "gimmick" ending, and gives the book a metaphysical turn—the reader learns that Pincher Martin has been dead from the beginning of the narrative.

The author's use of flashbacks throughout the narrative of Pincher Martin was discussed by Avril Henry in Southern Review: "On the merely narrative level" Goulding's plot device "is the natural result of Martin's isolation and illness, and is the process by which he is gradually brought to his ghastly self-knowledge." In fact, added Henry, the flashbacks "function in several ways. First the flashbacks relate to each other and to the varied forms in which they themselves are repeated throughout the book; second, they relate also to the details of Martin's 'survival' on [the rock]…. Third, they relate to the six-day structure of the whole experience: the structure which is superficially a temporal check for us and Martin in the otherwise timeless and distorted events on the rock and in the mind, and at a deeper level is a horrible parody of the six days of Creation. What we watch is an unmaking process, in which man attempts to create himself his own God, and the process accelerates daily."

While acknowledging the influences present in the themes of Pincher Martin—from Homer's Odysseus to Robinson Crusoe again—Stephen Medcalf in his William Golding suggests that the novel is Golding's most autobiographical work to date. The author, said Med-calf, assigned to Martin "more of the external conditions of his own life than to any other of his characters, from [his education at] Oxford … through a period of acting and theatre life to a commission in the wartime Navy." Golding also added a dimension from his own past, noted Medcalf, citing the author's "childhood fear of the darkness of the cellar and the coffin ends crushed in the walls from the graveyard outside [his childhood home]. The darkness universalizes him. It becomes increasingly but always properly laden with symbolism: the darkness of the thing that cannot examine itself, the observing ego: the darkness of the unconscious, the darkness of sleep, of death and, beyond death, heaven."

To follow Pincher Martin, Golding "next wanted to show the patternlessness of life before we impose our patterns on it," according to Green. However, the resulting book, Free Fall, Green noted, "avoids the amoebic paradox suggested by his own prophecy, and falls into a more normal pattern of development: normal, that is, for Golding." Not unlike Pincher Martin, Free Fall depicts through flashbacks the life of its protagonist, artist Sammy Mountjoy. Imprisoned in a darkened cell in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, Mountjoy, who has been told that his execution is imminent, has only time to reflect on his past.

Despite the similarity in circumstance to Pincher Martin, Oldsey found one important difference between that novel and Free Fall. In Free Fall, a scene showing Sammy Mountjoy's tortured reaction on (symbolically) reliving his own downfall indicates a move toward atonement. "It is at this point in Golding's tangled tale that the reader begins to understand the difference between Sammy Mountjoy and Pincher Martin," Oldsey explained. "Sammy escapes the machinations of the camp psychiatrist, Dr. Halde, by making use of man's last resource, prayer. It is all concentrated in his cry of 'Help me! Help me!'—a cry which Pincher Martin refuses to utter. In this moment of desperate prayer, Sammy spiritually bursts open the door of his own selfishness."

Medcalf saw the story as Dantesque in nature—Mount-joy's romantic interest is even named Beatrice—and remarked that "Dante, like Sammy, came to himself in the middle of his life, in a dark wood [the cell, in Sammy's case], unable to remember how he came there…. His only way out is to see the whole world, and himself in its light. Hell, purgatory and heaven are revealed to him directly, himself and this world of sense in glimpses from the standpoint of divine justice and eternity." In Free Fall Golding's intent "is to show this world directly, in other hints and guesses. He is involved therefore in showing directly the moment of fall at which Dante only hints. He has a hero without reference points, who lives in the vertigo of free fall, therefore, reproachful of an age in which those who have a morality or a system softly refuse to insist on them: a hero for whom no system he has will do, but who is looking for his own unity in the world—and that, the real world, is 'like nothing, because it is everything.' Golding, however, has the advantage of being able to bring Dante's world in by allusion: and he does so with a Paradise hill on which Beatrice is met."

In Golding's fifth novel, The Spire, "the interest is all in the opacity of the man and in a further exploration of man's all-sacrificing will," wrote Medcalf. Fourteenth-century clergyman Dean Jocelin "is obsessed with the belief that it is his divine mission to raise a 400—foot tower and spire above his church," Oldsey related. "His colleagues protest vainly that the project is too expensive and the edifice unsuited for such a shaft. His master builder—obviously named Roger Mason—calculates that the foundation and pillars of the church are inadequate to support the added weight, and fruitlessly suggests compromises to limit the shaft to a lesser height. The townspeople—amoral, skeptical, and often literally pagan—are derisive about 'Jocelin's Folly.'" Dean Jo-celin, nonetheless, strives on. The churchman, in fact, "neglects all his spiritual duties to be up in the tower overseeing the workmen himself, all the while choosing not to see within and without himself what might interrupt the spire's dizzying climb," Oldsey continued. The weight of the tower causes the church's foundations to shudder; the townspeople increasingly come to see Jo-celin as a man dangerously driven.

The Spire "is a book about vision and its cost," observed New York Review of Books critic Frank Ker-mode. "It has to do with the motives of art and prayer, the phallus turned spire; with the deceit, as painful to man as to God, involved in structures which are human but have to be divine, such as churches and spires. But because the whole work is a dance of figurative language such an account of it can only be misleading." Characteristic of all Golding's work, The Spire can be read on two levels, that of an engrossing story and of a biting analysis of human nature. As Nigel Dennis found in the New York Times Book Review, Golding "has always written on these two levels. But The Spire will be of particular interest to his admirers because it can also be read as an exact description of his own artistic method. This consists basically of trying to rise to the heights while keeping himself glued to the ground. Mr. Golding's aspirations climb by clinging to solid objects and working up them like a vine. This is particularly pronounced in [The Spire], where every piece of building stone, every stage of scaffolding, every joint and ledge, are used by the author to draw himself up into the blue."

By 1965 Golding appeared to be on his way to continuing acclaim and popular acceptance, but then his output dropped dramatically: for the next fifteen years he produced no novels and only a handful of novellas, short stories, and occasional pieces. Published during this period, The Pyramid is a collection of three interrelated novellas detailing the episodic story of a man's existence in the suspiciously named English town of Stilbourne. Generally regarded as one of the writer's weaker efforts, The Pyramid proved a shock to "even Golding's most faithful adherents [who] wondered if the book contributed anything to the author's reputation. To some," added Oldsey, "it seemed merely three weak stories jammed together to produce a salable book." The Pyramid, however, did have its admirers, among them John Wakeman, writing in the New York Times Book Review, who called the work Golding's "first sociological novel. It is certainly more humane, exploratory, and life-size than its predecessors, less Old Testament, more New Testament." To a Times Literary Supplement critic the book "will astonish by what it is not. It is not a fable, it does not contain evident allegory, it is not set in a simplified or remote world. It belongs to another, more commonplace tradition of English fiction; it is a low-keyed, realistic novel of growing up in a small town—the sort of book H.G. Wells might have written if he had been more attentive to his style."

The Scorpion God: Three Short Novels, another collection of novellas, was somewhat better received. One Times Literary Supplement reviewer, while calling the work "not major Golding," nonetheless found the book "a pure example of Golding's gift…. The title story is from Golding's Egyptological side and is set in ancient Egypt…. By treating the unfamiliar with familiarity, explaining nothing, he teases the reader into the strange world of the story. It is as brilliant a tour de force as The Inheritors, if on a smaller scale."

Golding's reemergence within the literary world occurred in 1979 with the publication of Darkness Visible. Despite some fifteen years' absence from novel writing, the author "returns unchanged," Samuel Hynes observed in a Washington Post Book World article. Golding was seen as "still a moralist, still a maker of parables. To be a moralist you must believe in good and evil, and Golding does; indeed, you might say that the nature of good and evil is his only theme. To be a parable-maker you must believe that moral meaning can be expressed in the very fabric of the story itself, and perhaps that some meanings can only be expressed in this way; and this, too, has always been Golding's way."

The title Darkness Visible derives from Milton's description of Hell in Paradise Lost, and from the first scenes of the book Golding confronts the reader with images of fire, mutilation, and pain—which he presents in biblical terms. For instance, noted Commonweal reviewer Bernard McCabe, the novel's opening describes a small child, "horribly burned, horribly disfigured," "out of the flames at the height of the London blitz…. The shattered building he emerges from … is called 'a burning bush,' the firemen stare into 'two pillars of lighted smoke,' the child walks with a 'ritual gait,' and he appears to have been 'born from the sheer agony of a burning city.'" The rescued youth, dubbed Matty, the left side of whose face has been left permanently mutilated, grows up to be a religious visionary.

"If Matty is a force for light, he is opposed by a pair of beautiful twins, Toni and Sophy Stanhope," continued Susan Fromberg Schaeffer in her Chicago Tribune Book World review of Darkness Visible. "These girls, once symbols of innocence in their town, discover the seductive attractions of darkness. Once, say the spirits who visit Matty, the girls were called before them, but they refused to come. Instead, obsessed by the darkness loose in the world, they abandon morality, choosing instead a demonic hedonism that allows them to justify anything, even mass murder." "Inevitably, the two girls will … [embark on a] spectacular crime, and just as inevitably, Matty, driven by his spirit guides, must oppose them," summarized Time reviewer Peter S. Prescott. "The confrontation, as you may imagine, ends happily for no one."

Some of the ideas explored in 1980's Rites of Passage trace back to Lord of the Flies and to Golding's view "of man as a fallen being capable of a 'vileness beyond words,'" stated New Statesman reviewer Blake Morrison. Set in the early nineteenth century, Rites of Passage tells of a voyage from England to Australia as recounted through the shipboard diary of young aristocrat Edmund Talbot. Talbot "sets down a vivid record of the ship and its characters," explained Morrison, listing among these characters "the irascible Captain Anderson…, the 'wind-machine Mr Brockleband,' the whorish 'painted Magdalene' called Zenobia, and the meek and ridiculous 'parson,' Mr. Colley, who is satirised as mercilessly as the clerics in [Henry] Fielding's Joseph Andrews." This latter character is the one through which much of the dramatic action in Rites of Passage takes place. For Colley, this "country curate … this hedge priest," as Golding's Talbot describes him, "is the perfect victim—self-deluding, unworldly, sentimentally devout, priggish, and terrified. Above all he is ignorant of the powerful homosexual streak in his nature that impels him toward the crew and especially toward one stalwart sailor, Billy Rogers," noted Robert Towers in the New York Review of Books. Driven by his passion yet torn by doubt, ridiculed and shunned by the other passengers on the ship, Colley literally dies of shame during the voyage.

The author faced his harshest criticism to date with the publication of his 1984 novel, The Paper Men. A farce-drama about an aging, successful novelist's conflicts with his pushy, overbearing biographer, The Paper Men "tells us that biography is the trade of the con man, a fatuous accomplishment, and the height of impertinence in both meanings of the word," according to London Times critic Michael Ratcliff. Unfortunately for Golding, many critics found The Paper Men to be sorely lacking in the qualities that distinguish the author's best work. In a typical commentary, Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times: "Judging from the tired, petulant tone of [the novel], Mr. Golding would seem to have more in common with his creation than mere appearance—a 'scraggy yellow-white beard, yellow-white thatch and broken-toothed grin.' He, too, seems to have allowed his pessimistic vision of man to curdle his view of the world and to sour his enjoyment of craft."

Golding saw the publication of two more novels before his death in 1993. Close Quarters, published in 1987, and Fire down Below, published in 1989, complete the trilogy begun with Rites of Passage. The first volume in the series, according to Bernard F. Dick in World Literature Today, "portrayed a voyage to Australia on a ship that symbolized class-conscious Britain (circa 1810) facing the rise of the middle class…. Close Quarters continues the voyage, but this time the ship, which is again a symbol of Britain, is near collapse." The story is told through the journal entries of Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, "a well-meaning, somewhat uncertain, slightly pompous officer and gentleman enroute to Sydney and a career in His Majesty's service," as a Publishers Weekly reviewer observed. When an inexpe-rienced sailor's error destroys the ship's masts, the crew and passengers are left to ponder their mortality. "As with most of Golding's fiction," David Nokes asserted in the Times Literary Supplement, "it is impossible to escape a brooding, restless intensity which turns even the most trivial incident or observation into a metaphysical conceit." As the ship founders and its captives become increasingly agitated, it seems to become a living thing itself, with twigs sprouting from its timbers and discernable creeping movements in its deck planks underfoot. Noting that Golding's "touch never falters," Nokes concluded that the novelist's "attention to details of idiom and setting show a reverence for his craft that would do credit to a master-shipwright. It is in the dark undertow of his metaphors and in the literary ostentation of his allusions that a feeling of strain and contrivance appears. As he steers us through the calms and storms, we are never quite sure whether we are in the safe hands of a master-mariner or under the dangerous spell of an Old Man of the Sea."

New York Times Book Review contributor Robert M. Adams had high hopes for the final book of the trilogy based on his reading of Close Quarters. He asserted that the second volume "will not stand up by itself as an independent fiction the way Rites of Passage did…. But this is the wrong time to pass final judgment on a project, the full dimensions of which can at this point only be guessed. In one sense, the very absence from this novel of strong scenes and sharply defined ironies confirms one's sense of a novelist who is still outward bound, firmly in control of his story, and preparing his strongest effects for the resolutions and revolutions to come." Los Angeles Times Book Review critic Richard Hough also found Close Quarters unable to stand alone: "This reviewer confesses to being totally mystified by Golding's sequel to Rites of Passage. It is neither an allegory, nor a fantasy, nor an adventure, nor even a complete novel, as it has a beginning, a middle (of sorts) but an ending only at some unspecified future date when Golding chooses to complete it, if he does."

The final volume of the trilogy, Fire down Below, appeared in 1989. The title refers to a plan for repairing the ship's masts that entails creating iron bands to pull together the split wood preventing the masts from bearing the weight of the sails. Implementing the plan also carries the danger of starting a fire in the hold while forging the iron. Quill and Quire reviewer Paul Stuewe described Fire down Below as an "ambitious and satisfying novel" and "a rousing finale to an entertaining exercise in historical pastiche." While asserting that neither Fire down Below nor Close Quarters "works as powerfully and coherently as Rites of Passage with its strongly structured story of a parson who literally died of shame," New Statesman & Society contributor W.L. Webb observed that "what keeps one attending still, as to the other ancient mariner's tales of ice mast-high, are [Golding's] magic sea pictures: faces on the quarterdeck masked in moonlight, the eerie 'shadow' that falls behind solid bodies in mist and spray, storm-light and a droning wind, and the sailors swarming out like bees as the wounded ship yaws close to the ice cliffs. There's nothing quite like it in our literature."

"As a novelist, William Golding had the gift of terror," Joseph J. Feeney wrote in an obituary for America following the author's death in 1993. "It is not the terror of a quick scare—a ghost, a scream, a slash that catches the breath—but a primal, fearsome sense of human evil and human mystery…. Golding was, with Graham Greene, the finest British novelist of [the second half of the twentieth century]…. His fellow novelist Malcolm Bradbury memorialized him as 'a writer who was both impishly difficult, and wonderfully monumental,' and a teller of 'primal stories—about the birth of speech, the dawn of evil, the strange sources of art.'" Upon Golding's death his novel The Double Tongue, remained incomplete. Set in ancient Greece during the age of Caesar, the novel was published in 1996 in its unfinished form.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Anderson, David, The Tragic Past, John Knox Press, 1969.

Biles, J. I., and Robert O. Evans, editors, William Golding: Some Critical Considerations, University Press of Kentucky, 1979.

Bloom, Harold, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Chelsea House (New York, NY), 1996.

Burgess, Anthony, The Novel Now: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction, Norton (New York, NY), 1967.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973, Volume 2, 1974, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 10, 1979, Volume 18, 1981, Volume 27, 1984, Volume 58, 1990, Volume 81, 1994.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 15: British Novelists, 1930–1959, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1983, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

Friedman, Lawrence S., William Golding, Continuum (New York, NY), 1993.

Johnson, Arnold, Of Earth and Darkness: The Novels of William Golding, University of Missouri Press, 1980.

McCarron, Kevin, The Coincidence of Opposites: William Golding's Later Fiction, Sheffield Academic Press, 1995.

Medcalf, Stephen, William Golding, Longman (London, England), 1975.

Reilly, Patrick, Lord of the Flies: Fathers and Sons, Twayne (New York, NY), 1992.

Ries, Lawrence R., Wolf Masks: Violence in Contemporary Fiction, Kennikat Press, 1975.

Siegl, Karin, The Robinsonade Tradition in Robert Michael Ballantyne's The Coral Island and William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Edwin Mellen Press, 1996.

Swisher, Clarice, editor, Readings on Lord of the Flies, Greenhaven Press, 1997.

PERIODICALS

America, July 31, 1993, pp. 6-7.

Antiquity, December, 1996, Paul Graves-Brown, review of The Inheritors, p. 978.

Atlantic, May, 1965; April, 1984.

Booklist, November 15, 1999, review of Lord of the Flies, p. 601.

Chicago Tribune, October 7, 1983.

Chicago Tribune Book World, December 30, 1979; October 26, 1980; April 8, 1984.

Children's Literature, 1997, p. 205.

Commentary, January, 1968.

Commonweal, October 25, 1968; September 26, 1980.

Contemporary Review, May, 2002, Jonathan W. Doering, "The Fluctuations of William Golding's Critical Reputation," p. 285.

Critical Quarterly, summer, 1960; autumn, 1962; spring, 1967.

Critical Survey, January, 1997, Kevin McCarron, "'A Simple Enormous Grief': Eighteenth-Century Utopianism and 'Fire down Below,'" p. 36.

Critique, Volume 14, number 2, 1972.

Detroit News, December 16, 1979; January 4, 1981; April 29, 1984.

English Review, February, 2003, p. 34.

Explicator, spring, 1999, Arnold Kruger, review of Lord of the Flies, p. 167.

Kenyon Review, autumn, 1957.

Library Journal, November 15, 2003, Michael Rogers, review of Lord of the Flies, p. 103.

Life, November 17, 1967.

Listener, October 4, 1979; October 23, 1980; January 5, 1984.

London Magazine, February-March, 1981.

London Review of Books, June 17, 1982.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 9, 1980; June 20, 1982; June 3, 1984; June 7, 1987, pp. 3, 6.

New Republic, December 8, 1979; September 13, 1982.

New Statesman, August 2, 1958; April 10, 1964; November 5, 1965; October 12, 1979; October 17, 1980; June 11, 1982.

New Statesman & Society, April 14, 1989, p. 34.

Newsweek, November 5, 1979; October 27, 1980; April 30, 1984.

New Yorker, September 21, 1957.

New York Post, December 17, 1963.

New York Review of Books, April 30, 1964; December 7, 1967; February 24, 1972; December 6, 1979; December 18, 1980.

New York Times, September 1, 1957; November 9, 1979; October 15, 1980; October 7, 1983; March 26, 1984; June 22, 1987.

New York Times Book Review, October 23, 1955; April 19, 1964; November 18, 1979; November 2, 1980; July 11, 1982; May 31, 1987, p. 44.

Publishers Weekly, May 15, 1987, p. 267.

Quill and Quire, July, 1989, p. 47.

Review of English Literature, Volume 1, number 2, 1960, Peter Green, "The World of William Gold-ing," pp. 67-72.

Saturday Review, March 19, 1960.

South Atlantic Quarterly, autumn, 1970.

Southern Review, March, 1976.

Spectator, October 13, 1979.

Time, September 9, 1957; October 13, 1967; October 17, 1983; April 9, 1984; June 8, 1987.

Times (London, England), February 9, 1984; June 11, 1987.

Times Literary Supplement, October 21, 1955; October 23, 1959; June 1, 1967; November 5, 1971; November 23, 1979; October 17, 1980; July 23, 1982; March 2, 1984; June 19, 1987, p. 653.

Twentieth Century Literature, summer, 1982; fall, 2001, p. 391.

Village Voice, November 5, 1979.

Washington Post, July 12, 1982; October 7, 1983; January 12, 1986.

Washington Post Book World, November 4, 1979; November 2, 1980; April 15, 1984.

World Literature Today, spring, 1988, p. 81; autumn, 1989, p. 681; summer, 1996, Carter Kaplan, review of The Double Tongue, p. 691.

Yale Review, spring, 1960.