Book description
William Golding was born in 1911 and educated at his local grammar
school and Brasenose College, Oxford. He published a volume of poems
in 1934 and during the war served in the Royal Navy. Afterwards he
returned to being a schoolmaster in Salisbury. Lord of the Flies, his
first novel, was an immediate success, and was followed by a series of
remarkable novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and The
Spire. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980, was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, and was knighted in
1988. He died in 1993.
John Carey is Emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford
University, a distinguished critic, reviewer and broadcaster, and the
author of several books, including studies of Donne, Dickens and
Thackeray, as well as The Intellectuals and the Masses. He is the
editor of Faber anthologies of Reportage, Utopias and Science. His
most recent book, What Good are the Arts?, was praised by Blake
Morrison as 'incisive and inspirational.'
