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William Golding was born September 19, 1911, in Saint Columb Minor, Cornwall, England.
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When William was just 12 years old, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to write a novel.
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Golding began attending Brasenose College at Oxford in 1930, and spent two years studying science, in deference to his father's beliefs.
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IGolding took a position teaching English and philosophy at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. Golding’s experience teaching unruly young boys would later serve as inspiration for his novel Lord of the Flies.
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In 1935 he started teaching English and philosophy in Salisbury, but he temporarily left teaching in 1940 to join the Royal Navy.
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After 21 rejections, Golding published his first and most acclaimed novel, Lord of the Flies. The novel told the gripping story of a group of adolescent boys stranded on a deserted island after a plane wreck.
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Following the publication of his best-known work, Lord of the Flies, Golding was granted membership in the Royal Society of Literature in 1955.
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Pincher Martin followed in 1956. Like Lord of the Flies, it concerns survival after shipwreck. Navy lieutenant Christopher Martin is thrown from his ship during combat in World War II. He finds a rock to cling to, and the rest of the story is related from this vantage point, detailing his struggle for survival and recounting the details of his life.
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Unlike his first three novels, Free Fall is told with a first person narrator, an artist named Samuel Mountjoy. The novel takes as a model Dante's La Vita Nuova, a collection of love poems interspersed with Dante's own commentary on the poems. Golding uses the character Mountjoy to comment on the conflict between rationalism and faith.
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The Nobel Prize in Literature 1983 was awarded to William Golding "for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today".
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Ten years later, he received the honorary designation Commander of the British Empire (CBE) and was knighted in 1988.
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William Golding had died of Congestive Heart Failure in Perranarworthal, Cornwall England
