William Golding
Winner of the Booker Prize (1980) and Nobel Prize for Literature (1983)
#onhisbirthdaytoday
17th September
A campus cult favourite!
Famous for his statement - Man (sic) produces evil as a bee produces honey.
Lieutenant William Golding won the Booker Prize for literature in 1980 for Rites of Passage.
He is an allegorist who uses his novels as a canvas to paint portraits of man’s constant struggle between his civilized self and his hidden, darker nature.
After graduating from Oxford, Golding perpetuated family tradition by becoming a schoolmaster in Salisbury, Wiltshire. His teaching career was interrupted in 1940, however, when World War II found “Schoolie,” as he was called, serving five years in the Royal Navy.
Lieutenant Golding saw active duty in the North Atlantic, commanding a rocket-launching craft. Present at the sinking of the Bismarck and participating in the D-Day invasion of France by Allied forces, Golding later told Joseph Wershba of the New York Post –
World War Two was the turning point for me. I began to see what people were capable of doing.
Indeed, the author’s anxieties about both nuclear war and the potential savagery of humankind were the basis of the novel Lord of the Flies.
One reason why Lieutenant Golding’s writing is characterized by a “dark and morose view of society and human nature.”
After witnessing the events of World War II, he believed that humans are inherently capable of evil, and hence famously stated –
Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.
While the story of Lord of the Flies has been compared to such previous works as Robinson Crusoe and High Wind in Jamaica, Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies 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.
[Sources: Gale’s Encyclopedia of World Literature / Britannica]
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