William Golding

(1911 - 1993)

William Golding’s first and best-known of his dozen novels was rejected by twenty-one publishers and was originally titled Strangers from Within; he also considered A Cry of Children and Nightmare Island before an editor at Faber & Faber proposed Lord of the Flies. T.S. Eliot said that it was “not only a splendid novel but morally and theologically impeccable.” Golding received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, was knighted in 1988, and died at the age of eighty-one in 1993.