1. William Golding was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature.
25 Facts About William Golding
1. 2.
William Golding was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
3.
The William Golding family lived at 29, The Green, Marlborough, Wiltshire, William Golding and his elder brother Joseph attending the school at which their father taught.
4.
William Golding's mother was a campaigner for female suffrage; she was Cornish and was considered by her son "a superstitious Celt", who used to tell him old Cornish ghost stories from her own childhood.
5.
In 1930, William Golding went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read Natural Sciences for two years before transferring to English for his final two years.
6.
William Golding returned in 1945 and taught the same subjects until 1961.
7.
William Golding kept a personal journal for over 22 years from 1971 until the night before his death; it contained approximately 2.4 million words in total.
8.
William Golding was engaged to Molly Evans, a woman from Marlborough, who was well liked by both of his parents.
9.
William Golding served on a destroyer which was briefly involved in the pursuit and sinking of the German battleship Bismarck.
10.
William Golding participated in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, commanding a landing craft that fired salvoes of rockets onto the beaches.
11.
William Golding was in action at Walcheren in October and November 1944, during which time 10 out of 27 assault craft that went into the attack were sunk.
12.
William Golding had a troubled relationship with alcohol; Judy Carver notes that her father was "always very open, if rueful, about problems with drink".
13.
William Golding suggested that his self-described "crisis", of which alcoholism played a major part, had plagued him his entire life.
14.
Unfortunately, the eventual publication of The Spire the following year did not help William Golding's developing struggle with alcohol; it had precisely the opposite effect, with the novel's scathingly negative reviews in a BBC radio broadcast affecting him severely.
15.
William Golding eventually became unable to deal with what he perceived to be the intense reality of his life without first drinking copious amounts of alcohol.
16.
Tim Kendall suggests that these experiences manifest in William Golding's writing as the character Wilf in The Paper Men; "an ageing novelist whose alcohol-sodden journeys across Europe are bankrolled by the continuing success of his first book".
17.
William Golding travelled to Switzerland in 1971 to see Jung's landscapes for himself.
18.
William Golding died of heart failure eight years later on 19 June 1993.
19.
William Golding's body was buried in the parish churchyard of Bowerchalke near his former home and the Wiltshire county border with Hampshire and Dorset.
20.
William Golding's book was championed by Charles Monteith, a new editor at the firm.
21.
William Golding's publishing success made it possible for Golding to resign his teaching post at Bishop Wordsworth's School in 1961, and he spent that academic year in the United States as writer-in-residence at Hollins College, near Roanoke, Virginia.
22.
William Golding won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Darkness Visible in 1979, and the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980.
23.
In September 1993, only a few months after his unexpected death, the First International William Golding Conference was held in France.
24.
In 1983, William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for 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".
25.
In 1980, William Golding published Rites of Passage, the first of his novels about a voyage to Australia in the early nineteenth century.