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Lord of the Flies has entered the culture. Ralph, Jack and Piggy are archetypes of human fallibility, but most of all they are real characters, fully imagined and leaping to life off the page.

First published in 1954, this classic novel has sold millions of copies worldwide (more than 25 million in English alone). It has been translated into all the major languages, and many minority ones (Georgian, Basque, Catalan). It has been adapted for radio, made into two films, dramatised for the stage by Nigel Williams and in an innovative ballet by Matthew Bourne.

Lord of the Flies has reached the status of a cultural referent that does not need to be named: the conch has been used as a symbol for explaining things as diverse as internet protocols and voting structures; Piggy's spectacles and physique have become a recognisable icon. What is more, any gathering of active, unruly children is likely to be described as 'like something out of Lord of the Flies.'

The power of Golding's tragedy has had such effect that the novel risks being oversimplified by its own legend. But a re-reading of the novel will always sweep one back to the freshness and vividness of the text, the characters remaining real children, and the tragedy continuing to be unbearable. The extraordinary beauty of Golding's coral island and the poignancy of his characters' youth and vulnerability produce an experience of unique and perpetually surprising intensity.

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Support for students and teachers working from home is now available. Click here to send us your questions. Lord of the Flies has entered the culture. Ralph, Jack and Piggy are archetypes of human fallibility, but most of all they are real characters, fully imagined and leaping to life off the page.

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W illiam Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Apart from writing, his past and present occupations include being a schoolmaster, a lecturer, an actor, a sailor, and a musician. His father was a schoolmaster and his mother was a suffragette. He was brought up to be a scientist, but revolted. After two years at Oxford he read English literature instead, and became devoted to Anglo-Saxon. He spent five years at Oxford. Published a volume of poems in 1935. Taught at Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury. Joined the Royal Navy in 1940 and spent six years afloat, except for seven months in New York and six months helping Lord Cherwell at the Naval Research Establishment. He saw action against battleships (at the sinking of the Bismarck), submarines and aircraft. Finished as Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship. He was present off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Walcheren. After the war he returned to teaching, and began to write again. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was published in 1954. It was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. His other books are:

In 1980 he won the 'Booker Prize' for his novel Rites of Passage. He retired from teaching in 1962. After that, he lived in Wiltshire, listing his recreations as music, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek.

William Golding died in 1993.

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished inNobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
William Golding died on June 19, 1993.

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MLA style: William Golding - Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Tue. 17 Oct 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1983/golding/biographical/>

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The Nobel Prize in Literature 1983 was awarded to William Golding "for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today"

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For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don't even know about each other.

When I started writing a book about this more hopeful view, I knew there was one story I would have to address. It takes place on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. A plane has just gone down. The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who can't believe their good fortune. Nothing but beach, shells and water for miles. And better yet: no grownups.

On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts. One boy, Ralph, is elected to be the group's leader. Athletic, charismatic and handsome, his game plan is simple: 1) Have fun. 2) Survive. 3) Make smoke signals for passing ships. Number one is a success. The others? Not so much. The boys are more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Before long, they have begun painting their faces. Casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges - to pinch, to kick, to bite.

By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island is a smouldering wasteland. Three of the children are dead. "I should have thought," the officer says, "that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that." At this, Ralph bursts into tears. "Ralph wept for the end of innocence," we read, and for "the darkness of man's heart".

Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind

This story never happened. An English schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951 - his novel Lord of the Flies would sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more than 30 languages and hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century. In hindsight, the secret to the book's success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second world war. Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us?

I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding's view of human nature. That didn't happen until years later when I began delving into the author's life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression. "I have always understood the Nazis," Golding confessed, "because I am of that sort by nature." And it was "partly out of that sad self-knowledge" that he wrote Lord of the Flies.

I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island? I wrote an article on the subject, in which I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently. Readers responded sceptically. All my examples concerned kids at home, at school, or at summer camp. Thus began my quest for a real-life Lord of the Flies. After trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: "One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip ... Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel."

The article did not provide any sources. But sometimes all it takes is a stroke of luck. Sifting through a newspaper archive one day, I typed a year incorrectly and there it was. The reference to 1977 turned out to have been a typo. In the 6 October 1966 edition of Australian newspaper The Age, a headline jumped out at me: "Sunday showing for Tongan castaways". The story concerned six boys who had been found three weeks earlier on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of 'Ata for more than a year. According to the article, the captain had even got a television station to film a re-enactment of the boys' adventure.

I was bursting with questions. Were the boys still alive? And could I find the television footage? Most importantly, though, I had a lead: the captain's name was Peter Warner. When I searched for him, I had another stroke of luck. In a recent issue of a tiny local paper from Mackay, Australia, I came across the headline: "Mates share 50-year bond". Printed alongside was a small photograph of two men, smiling, one with his arm slung around the other. The article began: "Deep in a banana plantation at Tullera, near Lismore, sit an unlikely pair of mates ... The elder is 83 years old, the son of a wealthy industrialist. The younger, 67, was, literally, a child of nature." Their names? Peter Warner and Mano Totau. And where had they met? On a deserted island.

My wife Maartje and I rented a car in Brisbane and some three hours later arrived at our destination, a spot in the middle of nowhere that stumped Google Maps. Yet there he was, sitting out in front of a low-slung house off the dirt road: the man who rescued six lost boys 50 years ago, Captain Peter Warner.

Savagery in the 1963 film adaptation of Lord of the Flies. Photograph: Ronald Grant

Peter was the youngest son of Arthur Warner, once one of the richest and most powerful men in Australia. Back in the 1930s, Arthur ruled over a vast empire called Electronic Industries, which dominated the country's radio market at the time. Peter was groomed to follow in his father's footsteps. Instead, at the age of 17, he ran away to sea in search of adventure and spent the next few years sailing from Hong Kong to Stockholm, Shanghai to St Petersburg. When he finally returned five years later, the prodigal son proudly presented his father with a Swedish captain's certificate. Unimpressed, Warner Sr demanded his son learn a useful profession. "What's easiest?" Peter asked. "Accountancy," Arthur lied.

Peter went to work for his father's company, yet the sea still beckoned, and whenever he could he went to Tasmania, where he kept his own fishing fleet. It was this that brought him to Tonga in the winter of 1966. On the way home he took a little detour and that's when he saw it: a minuscule island in the azure sea, 'Ata. The island had been inhabited once, until one dark day in 1863, when a slave ship appeared on the horizon and sailed off with the natives. Since then, 'Ata had been deserted - cursed and forgotten.

It didn't take long for the first boy to reach the boat. 'My name is Stephen,' he cried. 'We've been here 15 months.'

But Peter noticed something odd. Peering through his binoculars, he saw burned patches on the green cliffs. "In the tropics it's unusual for fires to start spontaneously," he told us, a half century later. Then he saw a boy. Naked. Hair down to his shoulders. This wild creature leaped from the cliffside and plunged into the water. Suddenly more boys followed, screaming at the top of their lungs. It didn't take long for the first boy to reach the boat. "My name is Stephen," he cried in perfect English. "There are six of us and we reckon we've been here 15 months."

The boys, once aboard, claimed they were students at a boarding school in Nuku'alofa, the Tongan capital. Sick of school meals, they had decided to take a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm. Likely story, Peter thought. Using his two-way radio, he called in to Nuku'alofa. "I've got six kids here," he told the operator. "Stand by," came the response. Twenty minutes ticked by. (As Peter tells this part of the story, he gets a little misty-eyed.) Finally, a very tearful operator came on the radio, and said: "You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it's them, this is a miracle!"

In the months that followed I tried to reconstruct as precisely as possible what had happened on 'Ata. Peter's memory turned out to be excellent. Even at the age of 90, everything he recounted was consistent with my foremost other source, Mano, 15 years old at the time and now pushing 70, who lived just a few hours' drive from him. The real Lord of the Flies, Mano told us, began in June 1965. The protagonists were six boys - Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano - all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku'alofa. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand.

There was only one obstacle. None of them owned a boat, so they decided to "borrow" one from Mr Taniela Uhila, a fisherman they all disliked. The boys took little time to prepare for the voyage. Two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner were all the supplies they packed. It didn't occur to any of them to bring a map, let alone a compass.

The boys had set up a commune with food garden, gym, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire

No one noticed the small craft leaving the harbour that evening. Skies were fair; only a mild breeze ruffled the calm sea. But that night the boys made a grave error. They fell asleep. A few hours later they awoke to water crashing down over their heads. It was dark. They hoisted the sail, which the wind promptly tore to shreds. Next to break was the rudder. "We drifted for eight days," Mano told me. "Without food. Without water." The boys tried catching fish. They managed to collect some rainwater in hollowed-out coconut shells and shared it equally between them, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening.

Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, 'Ata is considered uninhabitable. But "by the time we arrived," Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, "the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination." While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.

Mr Peter Warner, third from left, with his crew in 1968, including the survivors from 'Ata. Photograph: Fairfax Media Archives/via Getty Images

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat - an instrument Peter has kept all these years - and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.

Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. "Don't worry," Sione joked. "We'll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa'ahau Tupou himself!"

They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).

When they arrived home, they found the police waiting to meet them. They were arrested and thrown in jail

They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local physician later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen's perfectly healed leg. But this wasn't the end of the boys' little adventure, because, when they arrived back in Nuku'alofa police boarded Peter's boat, arrested the boys and threw them in jail. Mr Taniela Uhila, whose sailing boat the boys had "borrowed" 15 months earlier, was still furious, and he'd decided to press charges.

Fortunately for the boys, Peter came up with a plan. It occurred to him that the story of their shipwreck was perfect Hollywood material. And being his father's corporate accountant, Peter managed the company's film rights and knew people in TV. So from Tonga, he called up the manager of Channel 7 in Sydney. "You can have the Australian rights," he told them. "Give me the world rights." Next, Peter paid Mr Uhila £150 for his old boat, and got the boys released on condition that they would cooperate with the movie. A few days later, a team from Channel 7 arrived.

The mood when the boys returned to their families in Tonga was jubilant. Almost the entire island of Haʻafeva - population 900 - had turned out to welcome them home. Peter was proclaimed a national hero. Soon he received a message from King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV himself, inviting the captain for an audience. "Thank you for rescuing six of my subjects," His Royal Highness said. "Now, is there anything I can do for you?" The captain didn't have to think long. "Yes! I would like to trap lobster in these waters and start a business here." The king consented. Peter returned to Sydney, resigned from his father's company and commissioned a new ship. Then he had the six boys brought over and granted them the thing that had started it all: an opportunity to see the world beyond Tonga. He hired them as the crew of his new fishing boat.

While the boys of 'Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding's book is still widely read. Media historians even credit him as being the unwitting originator of one of the most popular entertainment genres on television today: reality TV. "I read and reread Lord of the Flies ," divulged the creator of hit series Survivor in an interview.It's time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other. After my wife took Peter's picture, he turned to a cabinet and rummaged around for a bit, then drew out a heavy stack of papers that he laid in my hands. His memoirs, he explained, written for his children and grandchildren. I looked down at the first page. "Life has taught me a great deal," it began, "including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people."

This is an adapted excerpt from Rutger Bregman's Humankind, translated by Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore. A live streamed Q&A with Bregman and Owen Jones takes place at 7pm on 19 May 2020.

This article was amended on 12 May 2020 to remove a reference to William Golding beating his children. The line was based on Golding's own account of a pillow fight with his four-year-old son in which he described how he had enjoyed hitting the boy and "stopped when [my son] was on the verge of tears". Golding's daughter has said ( see letter) that their father never beat or smacked them.

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The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

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When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently to William Golding's bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman

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Like many of you, I was assigned to read William Golding's Lord of the Flies in junior high. (Raise your hand if you had the one with this cover). Looking back, was there a subconscious reason our teacher gave us this famous tale of a group of shipwrecked children and young teens turning into murderous savages? Were we really that bad?

Perhaps you've never read the book and got assigned To Kill a Mockingbird or Kes instead. Is Golding's book still worth picking up as an adult?

For sure, yes, and this animated explainer from Jill Dash of TED-Ed hopefully will entice you do so. What it provides is what we didn't get in school: context.

Golding had been a lieutenant in the Royal Navy during the war, and had returned to find a post-war world where nuclear annihilation felt palpable. He was also teaching at a private school for boys. He got to wondering: are we doomed as a species to savagery? Is war inevitable?

Golding was also thinking about the popular Young Adult novels (as we now call them) of his day, because he read them to his own children. A popular trope featured young boys as castaways on a desert island who get up to all sorts of fun adventures, with a dash of British colonialism thrown in for good measure. All were riffs on Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

Lord of the Flies, then, is a brutal satire, reducing angelic British schoolboys to a bloodthirsty mob in very little time, while in the greater world of the novel nuclear war rages. (Having read this during the '80s, the nuclear background was never impressed on us students. I think I would have found the novel even more terrifying.)

It took Golding ten years to find an interested publisher, and even then it was a flop on initial release. But its reputation soon grew, helped by Peter Brook's black-and-white film adaptation, and its pedagogical use as an allegorical tale during the Cold War. It also influenced a generation of writers. Stephen King named his fictional town Castle Rock after the kids' fort in the novel. It also opened the door for any number of Young Adult authors to deal with dark and troubling themes.

There were also real-world examples to draw from. In the same year, 1954, as Golding's novel appeared, Muzafer Sherif's The Robbers Cave Experiment was published. This was non-fiction, however, detailing an experiment in which 22 middle-class white boys were set up in two groups at a deserted Oklahoma summer camp. With scientists posing as counselors, they let the groups-the Rattlers and the Eagles-sort out their own hierarchies, then set up competitions.

The psychologists watched the arms race escalate over the following days. Finally, one violent mob brawl became so sustained that the researchers were forced to step in, drag the boys apart and remove them to separate locations.

How long did it take for mere friction to escalate into a juvenile war, in an idyllic setting where everyone had plenty of food? Phase two lasted just six days from the first insult ("Fatty!") to the final all-out brawl. Golding would have loved it.

We can see Golding's warning everywhere in popular culture, from the back-biting and betrayals in reality shows like Survivor to horror movies like The Purge. We've also seen the terrors that children can inflict on each other, Columbine school shooting onward. In Golding's novel, the children are rescued and revert back to a sobbing, dependent state. In the real world, alas, nobody's coming to save us.
Related Content: Why You Should Read One Hundred Years of Solitude: An Animated Video Makes the Case How to Memorize an Entire Chapter from "Moby Dick": The Art and Science of Remembering Everything Why Should We Read William Shakespeare? Four Animated Videos Make the Case Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Why We Should Read William Golding's Lord of the Flies: An Animated Video Makes the Case

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Like many of you, I was assigned to read William Golding's Lord of the Flies in junior high. (Raise your hand if you had the one with this cover). Looking back, was there a subconscious reason our teacher gave us this famous tale of a group of shipwrecked children and young teens turning into murderous savages?

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David Shariatmadari's account of my father's novel Lord of the Flies was a little sweeping when he declared: "William Golding sought to show that boys were, by their nature, little devils" (A real-life Lord of the Flies: the troubling legacy of the Robbers Cave experiment, 17 April) .

The boys in Lord of the Flies make quite a good fist of creating a democratic society, at least to begin with. Ralph, the democratically elected leader, admonishes Jack to stick to "the rules", because "the rules are the only thing we've got". In an interview the author said that the novel was about the importance of the rule of law. It was also about the complexity of human beings.

My father greatly distrusted simple judgments. He was careful to give Jack some good qualities, and to make him attractive. It's possible to imagine that under different circumstances Jack and Ralph would have been friends, would have helped each other's weaknesses, and admired each other's strengths. But the author shows that this cannot happen on the island because the boys in their isolation are suffering unchecked "from the terrible disease of being human".
William Golding's daughter reveals his 'darker side' in new book
Your writer states that, in contrast to Lord of the Flies, "context was everything" in the Robbers Cave experiment, and that Muzafer Sherif believed that "competition over scarce resources could drive people to enmity; place a common obstacle in their way, and they cooperate" (though this begs the questions how well they cooperate and for how long). But William Golding also sought to examine the boys' reaction in the face of such obstacles; it is the removal of law and order that engenders the eventual savage responses. For him too, context was everything, not least the novel's opening, in the savage context of a nuclear war.
Judy Golding Carver
Bristol
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What Lord of the Flies is really about | Letter from Judy Golding Carver

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David Shariatmadari's account of my father's novel Lord of the Flies was a little sweeping when he declared: "William Golding sought to show that boys were, by their nature, little devils" (A real-life Lord of the Flies: the troubling legacy of the Robbers Cave experiment, 17 April) .

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Their Inner Beasts: ‘Lord of the Flies’ Six Decades Later (Published 2016)

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Rereading William Golding’s classic, Lois Lowry finds herself despairing that circumstances led the children to such a hell.

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In a new video series, Judy Golding Carver talks about her father William Golding and Lord of the Flies. In the fourth and final video, Judy explores the impact of war and fatherhood.

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