Family papers suggest that Golding finished the novel in late 1952. He started sending it to publishers in early 1953, and - as is famous - it was rejected by many, until in September of that year a brilliant young editor at Faber and Faber, Charles Monteith, picked it out of the reject pile, started reading it and found himself gripped.

In his essay 'Strangers From Within' (Golding's original title for the novel), Monteith described the process whereby Golding's unsolicited manuscript was eventually accepted for publication. Monteith and his colleagues required changes in the book, and Golding co-operated, going further than was required of him. Monteith writes:

"The changes were even better than I had hoped for. All that I had suggested was a drastic shortening of the 'nuclear war' passages but Golding's solution was more radical and totally successful. They had disappeared completely and the novel's new opening could not have been bettered."
(William Golding: The Man and his Books, edited by John Carey, London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Copyright © Charles Monteith 1986)

In the early 1960s, Golding wrote his essay, 'Fable', giving some answers to the thousands of questions habitually put to him about Lord of the Flies. Here is a crucial passage:

"The overall intention [in writing the novel] may be stated simply enough. Before the second world war I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. It is possible that today I believe something of the same again; but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another."
('Fable', in The Hot Gates, London: Faber and Faber, new edition, 1970, page 86. Copyright © William Golding 1965.)

Lord of the Flies was published on 16 September 1954, half a century ago. Since then millions of copies have been sold. Its influence has been extraordinary, and its brilliant title has passed into everyday language as an instant description of childhood (or even adult) mayhem. The sense of place of the novel - the tropical island with its brilliant white sand and blazing sun, its exuberant forests and lavish plant and animal life - stays with the reader, and Golding acknowledged in his Journal that he had enormously enjoyed - as he put it - being on a coral island (he had never actually visited one). The characters, for all their dramatic and symbolic role, are vivid and lifelike. As Golding said in 'Fable',

'I have lived for many years with small boys, and understand and know them with awful precision.'

His novel has been the inspiration for plays, broadcasts, musicals, and even gardens. It is available in many editions and huge numbers of languages. There is a dramatization of the novel by Nigel Williams, the only one to be authorised by Golding. There is an audio-book of the novel's unabridged text, with Golding himself reading. An abridged one also exists, read by Tim Piggott-Smith. Two films have been made, and the first of these - in black and white, directed by Peter Brook, and with music by Raymond Leppard - is a tour de force, which astonished and gratified Golding himself. The author was featured twice on the South Bank Show.

Golding's Nobel citation praised

'his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today'.

The success of Lord of the Flies has been so extraordinary that it has tended to cast his other novels into undeserved obscurity.