William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies was first published on September 17, 1954, and is now considered a classic.
We recall how Golding’s story about English schoolboys and their moral decline into barbarism almost ended up on the pile of rejected novels.
“Write about what you know,” is advice often given to young authors lord of the flies is a spectacular example of how clichés can still contain essential truths.
As a boys’ school teacher who experienced first-hand the inhumanity of World War II, William Golding condensed the knowledge and experience into a debut novel, a seemingly simple story about shipwrecked boys who become barbarians on a desert island.
The reversal of the familiar story left an impression on generations of readers and served as a warning that the evils of Nazi Germany could be repeated anywhere.
lord of the flies was published before Golding’s 43rd birthday.
His big idea was actually an ominous reimagining Coral Islandstories by RM Ballantyne from 1857, about the daring adventures of British shipwrecked boys who civilize a deserted island, turning it into a playground for fun and games.
He wrote most of the manuscript in exercise books during working hours at school.
He worked on the novel during class, while his students were absorbed in their textbooks.
He recruited several of them to count the words he had written on the page.
Golding sent the novel to nine publishing houses in 1953, and all of them rejected it.
This did not prevent him from sending the manuscript to Faber and Faberone of the most prestigious London publishers.
He was accepted by Charles Montit, a novice editor who had previously worked at the publishing house for only a few months.
The first readings were not promising.
Absurd and uninteresting
In the BBC show Bookmark in 1984. he stated:
“There was one thing in particular that I could spot, and that was a crumpled, weather-beaten manuscript that had been going around publishing houses before it got here, and this one was just that.”
“It was a voluminous manuscript of yellow pages, the ends of which were beginning to curl, with one or two teacup or wine-glass stains, traces of spilled coffee or tea, and was bound in somewhat depressed brown card and accompanied by short formal letters.”
One of the professional readers at the publishing house has already made a written decision on Golding’s manuscript, dismissing it as “absurd and uninteresting fantasy”.
Next to a circled O for “rejected,” she wrote: “Boring garbage. Pointless.”
Fortunately for Golding, Montit gave the book another chance, deciding to save it from oblivion.
He said: “I skimmed through the book and I have to say I wasn’t attracted to the beginning of the book, but as I went on it completely grabbed me.
“And then I said to myself, ‘We’re going to have to take this seriously.'”
He convinced the publishing house Faber and Faber to publish the book, but first Golding had to make significant changes to the text.
Also, the original title Internal strangers he had to fly.
According to Golding’s biographer, Professor John Carey, the original manuscript was a religious novel that was “drastically different from lord of the flies which people later read”.
Capacity to do evil
Speaking for a documentary produced by the Arena network The Dreams of William GoldingCarey said the writer became a deeply religious man after World War II, when he served on a Royal Navy destroyer, but his editor suggested removing these elements.
“Golding went, went, went, until we came up with a novel that’s secular, doesn’t involve any supernatural intervention,” he says.
His experience in the war contributed to his profound sense of man’s capacity for evil and to his complete disillusionment with the political ideals he had as a young man.
lord of the flies is his warning that Nazism, which took over Germany in the early 1930s, can happen in any civilized country.
In the show The South Bank Show In 1980, he explained how the war changed his relationship to human nature.
“It just changed, little by little, because we found out what the Nazis were doing.”
“These were very civilized people who did, as we gradually learned, impossible things. I remember saying to myself in those days: ‘Yes, I too have a Nazi in me; if the circumstances were different, I could be a Nazi.’
“Little by little, I learned more and more about what was going on and it changed my attitude about what people are willing to do, so what human nature really is.”
“So those political sugarcoats, if you’re okay with that, seemed to me like they were going to fail completely as opposed to the man’s willingness to be absolutely evil.”
Although it is lord of the flies met with critical success, it was only after the novel was published in the United States, especially in paperback in 1959, that Golding became a best-selling author and began to earn large sums of money.
Success allowed him to leave his job as a professor and devote himself completely to writing.
“I didn’t like the systematic side of teaching kids, I’m not a systematic person at all,” he admitted on the show Bookmark in 1984
Commenting on his status as a literary debutant at a serious age, he said he broke through when he realized he had to stop imitating other writers.
“It wasn’t until I turned 37 that I think I realized the great truth that you have to write your own books and no one else’s, and then everything opened up,” he told the magazine. Monitor in 1959
When he was a young man, Stephen King loved books lord of the fliesand he got to it by borrowing it from a library on wheels when he asked for something to do with “how kids really behave.”
In an interview for the show Arena In 2012, he stated: “I was captivated by the story from the very beginning, because it was a boy’s story, the kind I was used to”.
“The difference was that the boys were real boys – they behaved the way I thought boys should behave.”
Storyteller in full
King set several of his stories in the fictional town of Castle Rock, named after the mountain fortress that Jack builds in the lord of the flies.
From Beachesa cult film from the nineties about backpackers, to a series about teenage cannibals Yellow jackets (Yellow jackets), as well as the obligatory parodies in The Simpsons, lord of the flies has become a pop cultural cornerstone.
The book has been adapted into a film twice, first in 1963, then in 1990, and a television version of the novel, created by Jack Thorne, is currently being filmed in Malaysia.
An original and highly imaginative writer, Golding would later write books about the last days of the Neanderthals, a sailor stranded on a rock in the Atlantic and the construction of a medieval cathedral tower.
In 1983, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature “for books that, with the insight of realistic narrative, the colorfulness and universality of myth, illuminate the human soul in today’s world.”
To Golding, the secret of his success seemed like a cliché.
“From head to toe I am completely a storyteller.”
“All I care about is that there’s a story with a beginning, middle and end,” he said on the show Bookmark in 1984
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