It’s the birthday of Sir William Golding (1911-1993), author of Lord of the Flies (1954), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1983), and lifelong proponent that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.”

Golding was born in the village of St. Columb Minor near the coastal town of Newquay in Cornwall, England. He said of his own self as a child that he was sometimes a brat and a bully. His mother was a suffragette and his father a schoolmaster, and after studying at Brasenose College, Oxford (1935), Golding eventually followed in his father’s footsteps and began teaching at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, Salisbury. (First he did a short stint in the theater.) World War II interrupted his career as a schoolmaster; he served in the Royal Navy as a lieutenant and commanded a rocket-firing ship that took part in the action at Normandy. After the war, he went back to teaching.

Golding’s experience in the classroom and in the war inspired Lord of the Flies, in which a group of boys stranded on a deserted island revert to savagery. The book was seized on by the post-war reading audience and by schoolmasters everywhere; it sold millions and generated two movie versions. Yet Golding came to hate the book, calling it “boring and crude,” and evidently much preferred his more subtle 1955 novel The Inheritors, which is about one race, Homo sapiens, destroying another, Neanderthals. Pincher Martin, a tragedy about a naval officer dying at sea, came out in 1956, Free Fall in 1959, and The Spire in 1964. Several more novels followed and Golding’s work was generally critically well-received, though nothing ever came near eclipsing the popularity of Lord of the Flies. In 1980, his novel Rites of Passage won the Booker Prize and was followed by two sequels, Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989), to form a sea trilogy called To the Ends of the Earth. The trilogy again explores the theme of man’s reversion to a savage state, this time on a British ship traveling to Australia in the early 19th century. (Fun fact: the BBC made this trilogy into a mini-series in 2005 starring Benedict Cumberbatch and several others who aren’t Benedict Cumberbatch, and it’s now available for viewing with your Amazon Prime membership. Really, what else did you have to do today?)

Golding loved the sea, loved small-boat sailing, and had two children with his wife of 54 years. (Speaking of the doctrine of total depravity: have a couple of children. Am I right?) Golding was a Christian but once said he hoped there was no afterlife: “I’d much rather not be me for thousands of years. Me? Hah!” He died at 81 of a probable heart attack.

Read an interesting reflection on Lord of the Flies by Lois Lowry here.

Extend grace to your fellow savages on this soft, gray Wednesday and stay ever scrupulously honest to the data.