William Golding

1911–1993

William Golding was a British novelist, playwright and poet best known for examining civilisation, violence and human nature. Born in Cornwall in 1911, he studied at Oxford and served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, experiences that strongly influenced his view of human behaviour. His first novel, Lord of the Flies, became an international classic through its portrayal of schoolboys whose attempt to govern themselves collapses into fear and brutality.

Golding also wrote several works with historical or prehistoric settings, including The Inheritors, which imagines an encounter between Neanderthals and early modern humans, and the To the Ends of the Earth trilogy, set aboard a nineteenth-century emigrant ship. His fiction is characterised by symbolic narratives, moral ambiguity and an interest in the fragile boundary between social order and violence. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983 and was knighted in 1988.

Periods and events

Napoleonic Era Georgian & Regency Britain Regency Era Georgian Empire and Atlantic World Royal Navy in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars Ancient Rome Imperial Rome Ancient World Ancient Egypt Prehistory World War II Interwar Period Roaring Twenties World War I & Interwar Era

Series

Series by William Golding (1 series)

To the Ends of the Earth in Order

by William Golding 3 books 3.9

To the Ends of the Earth follows Edmund Talbot, a well-connected young Englishman travelling to take up a colonial appointment in Australia during the Napoleonic era. The three novels are set aboard an ageing former warship crowded with naval officers, sailors, soldiers, emigrants and servants. Talbot begins the…