In 1954 William Golding was 43 years old and a nobody. He had been
demobbed from the navy at the end of World War Two and returned to his
pre-war job teaching English at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury.
Always hard up, he lived in what he called a "lousy council flat" with
his wife, Ann, and their two young children. In 1952 he finished the
novel that was to become Lord of the Flies, and sent it to five
publishers and a literary agency. They all rejected it. The sixth
publisher he tried was Faber and Faber, and the professional reader
wrote her opinion on the typescript: "Time the Future. Absurd &
uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the
Colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New
Guinea. Rubbish & dull." But the novel was rescued from the reject pile
by a new recruit to Faber, and when it was finally published in
September 1954 the poet Stevie Smith greeted it as "this beautiful and
desperate book". In the early 1960s cultural commentators noted that
Lord of the Flies was replacing Salinger's Catcher in the Rye as the
bible of the American adolescent. Its anti-war tenor helped to ensure
its profound impact on the young at a time when the Cold War was hotting
up. Since then, his masterpiece has established itself as a modern
classic. In this short, compelling guide, John Carey tells us how and
why.
