William Golding Summary

Biography EssayWilliam Golding achieved international fame and wide critical acceptance with his first published novel, Lord of the Flies, in 1954. Since that time his fictional canon has won Goldin... Read more

Once dubbed "Lord of the Campus" by Time magazine, Nobel Prize-winning British novelist William Golding spent an entire writing career living down his first novel, Lord of the Flies. A relative of Rob... Read more

William Golding achieved international fame and wide critical acceptance with his first published novel, Lord of the Flies, in 1954. Since that time he has produced six other distinguished novels (at... Read more

William Golding is an unusually controversial writer of the fantastic. First of all, his stature as a writer has been questioned despite--or possibly because of--the popular acceptance of his work. Se... Read more

Critical Essay by Peter M. Axthelm In contrast to [Arthur Koestler's] Darkness at Noon, which introduces one complete system, examines its collapse, and then tentatively offers another one, Go... Read more

Critical Essay by Lawrence R. Ries William Golding has taken exception to the neohumanists and the prophets of despair. He rejects their view of mankind: "I believe that man suffers from an ap... Read more

Critical Essay by P. N. Furbank The leading proposition in Golding's mind as a writer, endorsed alike by Freud and Christian theology, is that each of us recapitulates the history of the race.... Read more

Critical Essay by Mary Renault Amid a literary world dedicated to debating, reporting, or re-editing the effects of the human condition, William Golding on his lonely eminence continues to ponder its... Read more

Critical Essay by Samuel Hynes I may as well begin with a flat proposition: I think William Golding is the most interesting English novelist now writing…. I'd be rather surprised if [th... Read more

Critical Essay by David Montrose Just as Eliot's criticism is read more to learn about Eliot than, say, Marston or Massinger, so [A Moving Target, a] collection of lectures, essays, reviews, a... Read more

Critical Essay by Virginia Tiger The fiercely obdurate quality of Golding's imaginative achievement—what has been called his poetic intensity—derives from his ability to construc... Read more

"Nothing can be more gentle than [man] in his primitive state." "Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the author of nature." Through these quotes, Jean Jacques Rousseau, a nineteenth centu... Read more