Lord Of The Flies

William Golding was a not very good school teacher and would-be novelist who realised that real children would never behave the way they are presented in Victorian novels like The Coral Island. So he decided to write a novel about how children actually would behave if they were shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. The manuscript was rejected again and again by publisher after publisher before it was eventually accepted, but it made Golding one of the most highly acclaimed writers of his generation who would eventually go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Golding incorporated contemporary nuclear fears into the novel, so the schoolboys are fleeing the threat of nuclear war when their plane crashes and they find themselves on a desert island. At first they try to maintain school discipline, but gradually this breaks down and they revert to barbarism.   Golding would often incorporate science-fictional or fantastic elements in novels like The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and Darkness Visible, but this remains the novel for which he is best known.