People note British writer Sir
William Gerald Golding for his dark novels, especially
The Lord of the Flies (1954); he won the Nobel Prize of 1983 for literature.
People best know this British novelist, poet, and playwright for this novel. Golding spent two years, focusing on sciences, in Oxford but changed his educational emphasis to English, especially Anglo-Saxon, literature.
During World War II, he served as part of the royal Navy, which he left five years later. This experience strongly influenced his future novels. Later, he taught and focused on writing. Classical Greek literature, such as that of
Euripides, and
The Battle of Maldon , an Anglo-Saxon oeuvre of unknown author influenced him.
College students in the 1950s and 1960s gave the attention to
Lord of the Flies, first novel of Golding; their attention drove that of literary critics. He was awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980 for his novel
Rites of Passage , the first book of the trilogy
To the Ends of the Earth. He received knighthood in 1988.
In 2008,
The Times ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945."