Lord of the Flies by Sir William Golding

First published on this day (1954), Lord of the Flies is a novel by Nobel Prize winning British author Sir William Golding. This classic novel has sold over 25 million copies in English alone.

Lord of the Flies has reached the status of a cultural referent that does not need to be named: the conch has been used as a symbol for explaining things as diverse as internet protocols and voting structures; Piggy’s spectacles and physique have become a recognisable icon. What is more, any gathering of active, unruly children is likely to be described as like something out of Lord of the Flies.

The book takes place in the midst of an unspecified war. Some of the marooned characters are ordinary students, while others arrive as a musical choir under an established leader. With the exception of Sam and Eric and the choirboys, they appear never to have encountered each other before. 

The book portrays their descent into savagery; left to themselves on a paradisiacal island, far from modern civilization, the well-educated boys regress to a primitive state.

At an allegorical level, the central theme is the conflicting human impulses toward civilisation and social organisation—living by rules, peacefully and in harmony... and toward the will to power. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions and between morality and immorality.

How these play out, and how different people feel the influences of these form a major subtext of Lord of the Flies. The title of the book is a literal translation of Beelzebub, from 2 Kings 1:2–3, 6, 16.

There have been two english film adaptations, the first in 1963 directed by Peter Brook and the second in 1990 directed by Harry Hook. 

The book has also been adapted many times for both the theatre and radio.

Although he is best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), Golding would go on to write over a dozen novels in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth.

In 1983, Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature

To learn more about William Golding click and explore any of his media channels and network links in the tool-bar above.