William Golding (1911–1993)

William Golding was a schoolteacher for many years. He knew boys well — their cruelty, their capacity for hierarchy, their ability to persuade themselves that what they are doing is necessary or even noble. Lord of the Flies emerged from that knowledge.

A group of British schoolboys are stranded on an uninhabited island during a war. They are civilised children. They know the rules. They establish a society. The society collapses. What replaces it is something older and darker and more honest about what the boys were all along.

Golding's great irony is that the novel makes this collapse feel inevitable — not because human beings are evil but because civilisation is thinner than we want to believe, and the boys are simply human beings without the structures that usually contain what human beings are. The horror is not exceptional. That is the horror.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1983 for "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."

His Nobel Lecture (1983) opens with a joke at his own expense: the audience, he says, must be expecting "a half hour of unrelieved gloom". Read it at NobelPrize.org.