Word: goldinger
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His father was a schoolteacher, his mother a suffragist, and the Cornish village of his childhood comfortable and insular. His parents wanted him to become a scientist, but after two years at Oxford he decided to study English literature instead. After graduation he held a succession of temporary jobs, including...
This revelation, added to postwar years of teaching, produced Lord of the Flies (1954), a taut parable about a group of English schoolboys who are deposited for safekeeping on a coral island while their elders wage nuclear war. Slowly but inexorably, they revert to savagery. "The theme," Golding explained, "is...
The novel's continuing popularity (it has now sold more than 7 million copies) can easily be explained. Its follow-the-dots symbolism is eminently teachable ("The breaking of a pair of eyeglasses means . . ."), and the heavily underscored message of inescapable depravity is attractive to those who want no...
This point does not seem to need belaboring, yet the eight novels that Golding wrote after Lord of the Flies relentlessly do so, in frequently venturesome ways. Neanderthals are exterminated by a rapacious new breed of creatures called Homo sapiens (The Inheritors); a shipwrecked survivor clings to a rock in...
The common thread running through all this is a sort of dormitory determinism: we are poor little goats, born helpless and nasty into a world we never made, and we can only do what we were destined to do. Golding's earnestness in portraying this feral landscape is obvious...