William Golding is probably the most significant of the generation of English novelists whose work emerged in the 1950s and 60s. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 and won the Booker Prize in 1980 for Rites of Passage.

By far Golding's best known novel is his first, which has become a staple of the English GCSE and A level diet. Lord of the Flies (1954), a parody of R. M. Ballantyne's Victorian adventure yarn The Coral Island, is the story of a group of boys who find themselves stranded on a deserted ocean island during a future war. Its title, a literal translation of Beelzebub, suggests evil spirits, but the novel is in fact an investigation of inherent human evil. As the boys spe

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First published 07 March 2003

[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1788, accessed 20 November 2009.]