William Gerald Golding

Born Sept. 19, 1911, in the county of Cornwall. English writer.

Golding graduated from Oxford University in 1935. He served in the British Navy during World War II (1939–45). He worked as a teacher from 1945 to 1961. Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954; Russian translation, 1969), won wide renown. On the basis of an exceptional situation— the misadventures of a group of boys on an uninhabited island—the novel reveals the dangerous tendencies of modern civilization which would lead to fascism and war. Golding’s subsequent philosophical novels, including The Inheritors (1955), Free Fall (1959), and The Spire (1964; Russian translation, 1968), are also characterized by the acuteness of moral and ethical problems. Golding combines realism in the description of reality with symbolism growing out of the theme of his novels, which tend to contain philosophical generalizations. These generalizations, however, are expressed in figurative form and not didactically.