William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies

Publishers Weekly

In this trenchant portrait, British critic Carey weaves masterful readings of Golding's work with intimate details about his life. Drawing on newly available materials-including Golding's never-before seen journal-Carey chronicles Golding's life from his relatively isolated and unhappy childhood, and his struggles as a young writer trapped in a schoolteacher position, to his winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. Such early praise elevated Golding's first novel to heights that made the novel became better known than the novelist. Despite praise, Lord of the Flies was not an immediate bestseller. Golding's subsequent novels (among them The Inheritors and Pincher Martin) fared little better with critics and booksellers-until 1958, when literary critic Frank Kermode praised Pincher Martin as the work of a philosophical novelist whose great theme was the Fall of Man. As a writer-in-residence at Hollins College in America, Golding had finally earned enough success to be published in paperback. In spite of his glory, Golding remained sensitive throughout his life, battling fears of being alone in the dark, the supernatural, insects, and writing (as Carey elegantly enunciates, Golding's greatest fear was of not writing; he continued writing to postpone the terror of having nothing more to write).
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Kirkus Reviews

With the cooperation of his subject's daughter, Sunday Times chief book reviewer Carey (What Good Are the Arts?, 2006, etc.) produces the first major biography of Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding (1911-1993). The author is uniquely equipped to handle the task. He was the first person allowed access to Golding's immense archive of letters, journals and drafts, and he also knew Golding personally, having edited a Festschrift for his 75th birthday. The amount of detail is impressive, even staggering. After an unhappy career at Oxford and a stint in the Royal Navy during World War II, Golding became, like his father, a dissatisfied schoolteacher. He published several novels, including Lord of the Flies (his first book) in 1954, while laboring over class preparations and student essays. Literary celebrity finally freed him from his bondage in the classroom. Carey ably chronicles Golding's career-long relationship with Faber and Faber and editor Charles Monteith, and he describes Golding's long marriage, which was lubricated with alcohol, animated by world travel and punctuated by arguments, even violence. The author portrays an insecure Golding who revised ferociously but disdained research, often preferring the visions in his imagination to the inconvenience of fact. Although he professed to dislike publicity and fame, Golding reveled in it as well, accepting countless speaking engagements and tours all over the world, as well as numerous awards and honorary degrees. Despite Carey's enormous scholarship and access, however, much of this massive volume slips into hagiography. He invariably portrays Golding in the most positive way possible, dragging even the novelist's darkest demons-excessive drink, possible spousal abuse-into a forgiving if not flattering light. A tendentious but relentlessly thorough, historically important treatment.

Dwight Garner

…this plump and well-researched biography sits lightly in the lap; it reads like a picaresque novel…Running beneath Mr. Carey's biography…there is a lively counternarrative, one that portrays Golding, a man of constant sorrow, in a warm, fondly comic light. Part modern-day Job, part existential Charlie Brown, part long-suffering hero out of Bernard Malamud or Ian McEwan, Golding was a man for whom things constantly went wrong, yet he resolutely soldiered on.
—The New York Times

Wendy Smith

…this intelligent, elegantly written and deeply empathetic biography reminds us that the factual basis of a writer's neuroses is less important than the imaginative use he makes of them. Golding took the darkness he found in his own heart and rendered it visible in novels that examine with pity and horror "the long nightmare which is the bedrock of being human."
—The Washington Post

William Boyd

John Carey has had unrestricted access to the Golding archive, and it is unlikely that this biography will ever be bettered or superseded. Moreover, Carey…writes with great wit and lucidity as well as authority and compassionate insight. Perhaps because he has had the opportunity of reading the mass of Golding's unpublished intimate journals, he brings unusual understanding to the complex and deeply troubled man who lies behind the intriguing but undeniably idiosyncratic novels.
—The New York Times Book Review