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William Golding was born to science master and a housewife in Cornwall, England. His father was 47 and his mother 29.
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Golding took his B.A. degree with Second Class Honours in the summer of 1934, and later that year a book of his Poems was published by Macmillan & Co, with the help of his Oxford friend, the anthroposophist Adam Bittleston.
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In 1935 he started teaching English and philosophy in Salisbury.He was a schoolmaster teaching Philosophy and English in 1939, then just English from 1945 to 1961 at Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury, Wiltshire.
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Golding married Ann Brookfield, an analytical chemist,[9](p161) on 30 September 1939. They had two children, Judith and David.[5]
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He temporarily left teaching in 1940 to join the Royal Navy during WWII. He was briefly involved in the pursuit and sinking of the German battleship Bismarck. He also participated in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day
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In 1954, after 21 rejections, Golding published his first and most acclaimed novel, Lord of the Flies.
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Golding received the Nobel Prize in literature when he was 73 years old. The book was critically acclaimed for its masterful representation of the history of human kind itself.
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He spent the last few years of his life with simple living but high thinking at his small home in Cornwall. He continued to toil at his writing and finally died of a heart attack. He was 81.
