Before his death in 1993, he had been working on a novel set in Delphi, and narrated by the priestess of Apollo herself, the Pythia. In 1995, Faber published the novel, giving it one of the titles Golding wrote on the manuscript: The Double Tongue.

Golding left other material: his journal, running from 1971 until the night before his death, and amounting to over two million words; reminiscences; unpublished stories, plays, poems; and a large collection of letters from many correspondents. Many of these are being prepared for publication.

The Golding family seldom if ever threw anything away, especially if it had writing on it. The documentary evidence for Golding's life is extraordinarily rich, including his wartime certificates for wounds, boxes of receipts spread over many years, shopping lists, old cheque book stubs. A diary from his adolescence survives. His father prepared him a copy of Caesar, with text, translation and vocabulary: this survives. So does a similar version of Beowulf. Golding himself wrote in copies of books, and often left other documents in them. He started manuscripts, put them aside, and apparently forgot them. He was an enthusiastic photographer, and after 1971 these provide an illustrated commentary on his journal. There are audiotapes, home movies, and over a hundred glass negatives mostly taken by his father, some dating from the nineteenth century. There are photos of Golding in his pram...

John Carey's biography William Golding: The Man who Wrote Lord of the Flies will be published by Faber and Faber on 3 September 2009. Professor Carey has had unrestricted access to the Golding Family Archive, including Golding's unpublished writings, and has been given information by many friends and members of Golding's family. He provides a rich, sympathetic and honest portrait of this complex and gifted man, a portrait with many surprises.

In 1953, William Golding was a provincial schoolteacher, writing books in his breaks, lunch hours and holidays. His work had been rejected by every publisher he sent it to – until an editor at Faber pulled his manuscript off the rejection pile. This was to become Lord of the Flies, a book that would sell in its millions and bring Golding worldwide recognition. Drawing almost entirely on materials that have never before been made public, John Carey sheds new light on Golding. Through hundreds of letters, unpublished works and Golding's intimate journals, Carey draws a revelatory and definitive portrait of an extraordinary man. In an absorbing and compelling narrative, he reveals a many-sided figure: a war-hero, a reclusive depressive who considered himself a ‘monster', a family man, a victim of fears and phobias who battled against alcoholism, and a writer who trusted the imagination above all things.

John Carey is Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, a Fellow of the British Academy and Chief Book Reviewer for the Sunday Times. His books include studies of Donne, Milton, Thackeray and Dickens, The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good Are the Arts?