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 Robinson Crusoe, Golding's dystopian tale of juvenile survival and tyranny made its author's fame and became part of the campus canon on both sides of the Atlantic. Interweaving an allegory of Original Sin with descriptions of human primitivism, Lord of the Flies is ranked with George Orwell's Animal Farm and Ninety Eighty-four as a novel that invites--even demands--analysis. Golding produced other fables in his long writing career: both The Inheritors and Pincher Martin are takes on the limits of so-called rational man. Later in life, he also dabbled in social comedy with The Pyramid and The Paper Men, while with his eighteenth-century sea trilogy--Rites of Passage, Close Quarters, and Fire Down Below--Golding turned a...