Born on September 19 -- Happy Birthday, William Golding!

from Writer's Almanac (American Public Media: Garrison Keillor):


September 19 is the birthday of author William Golding, born in St. Columb Minor, Cornwall, England (1911). He was the child of a science teacher and a suffragette, and grew up in a house that was built in the 14th century. He was afraid of the dark, but his father gave him no sympathy because his fear was not rational. Golding started writing poetry when he was seven, and tried — and failed — to write his first novel when he was 12 years old. He was often angry and embarrassed about being from a lower social class, and was fond of taking his frustrations out on the other schoolboys. He attended Oxford and studied science at first, because his father wanted him to. In his third year, he switched to the study of literature, and published a book of poems the year before he graduated. For four years, he worked in a London theater as a writer, actor, and producer; he also took a job as a social worker to make ends meet. In 1939, he took a job as a teacher of English and philosophy in Salisbury; it turned out that he loved teaching, even though he was often dealing with unmanageable boys.
In 1940, Golding joined the Royal Navy, and grew to love the sea. But what he saw during his six years of service during World War II troubled him. He was faced with a huge ethical decision when he learned that he would have to take the ship across a minefield in order to be on time for the D-Day operations. He couldn’t decide whether to risk the lives of his men or the lives of all those participating in D-Day who needed their help. He made the decision to risk the journey, but later, he learned that the minefield wasn’t real — it was put on a map to fool the Germans, and his whole moral dilemma had been based on something that wasn’t even real. “I began to see what people were capable of doing,” he later said. “Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.”
When the war ended, he came home and returned to the classroom. He also wrote four novels, but none of them were published. It was his fifth attempt, and the first to be published, that people know best. That book was inspired by his years as a teacher, and colored by his war experience. He came up with the book’s title by translating the Hebrew name of a powerful demon into English: “Beelzebub” means “Lord of the Flies.” Golding’s novel is the story of a group of English schoolboys whose plane crashes on a pristine desert island during a nuclear war. Without the restraining, civilizing presence of adults, the boys begin to act according to their worst natures.
The manuscript was rejected 21 times before he sent it to Faber and Faber in London. It very nearly failed there too — an in-house reader called it an “absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the Colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull. Pointless.” But a new editor, Charles Monteith, saw potential in the book and fought for it. It wasn’t a smashing success right away; it only sold 3,000 copies in the United States, and it went out of print the next year. But it was rediscovered in the 1960s and has become a classic of 20th-century English literature.