There is much more to the art of William Golding than Lord
of the Flies.
Golding's work lives on and has a life of its own. His work has
influenced literary life and popular culture, not least in two film
versions of Lord of the Flies. Piggy's spectacles and the conch
shell are icons of human frailty and aspiration worldwide. The
whole idea was reprised in the TV series 'Lost'.
The other novels, all astonishingly different from each other,
are classics in their own right. The Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes,
read extensively from The Inheritors at Golding's memorial
service in 1993, and the setting itself - Salisbury Cathedral -
evocatively recalled The Spire, a perfect merger of the
individual and the local with the infinite and the symbolic.
Golding had great gifts as a comic writer and satirist - highly
underrated - and these are visible in The Scorpion God,
The Paper Men and To the Ends of the Earth 'A Sea
Trilogy'.
Students, teachers and general readers alike will enjoy
exploring these wonderful and highly individual fictional
worlds.
William Golding Limited has commissioned special resources to
help students and teachers with Lord of the Flies, freely available
on our pages. Just follow the links in the navigation bar for this
page.