9ce biography of william golding

American novelist, screenwriter and playwright (1931–2018)

Not to be confused with William Golding.

For other people named William Goldman, see William Goldman (disambiguation).

William Goldman (August 12, 1931 – November 16, 2018) was an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He first came to prominence in the 1950s as a novelist before turning to screenwriting. Among other accolades, Goldman won two Academy Awards in both writing categories: first for Best Original Screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and then for Best Adapted Screenplay for All the President's Men (1976).

His other well-known works include his thriller novel Marathon Man (1974) and his cult classic comedy/fantasy novel The Princess Bride (1973), both of which he also adapted for film versions.

Early life

Goldman was born in Chicago on August 12, 1931, the second son of Marion (née Weil) and Maurice Clarence Goldman. He grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, and was raised Jewish. Goldman's father was a successful businessman, working in Chicago and in a partnership, but he suffered from alcoholism, which cost him his business. He "came home to live and he was in his pajamas for the last five years of his life," according to Goldman. His father committed suicide while Goldman was still in high school. It was a 15-year-ol

(William Gerald Golding)

PERSONAL: Born September 19, 1911, in St. Columb Minor, Cornwall, England; died of a heart attack June 19, 1993, in Perranarworthal, near Falmouth, England; son of Alex A. (a schoolmaster) and Mildred A. Golding; married Ann Brookfield, 1939; children: David, Judith. Education: Brasenose College, Oxford, B.A., 1935, M.A., 1960. Hobbies and other interests: Sailing, archaeology, and playing the piano, violin, viola, cello, and oboe.

CAREER: Writer. Worked in a settlement house, c. 1935; Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, teacher of English and philosophy, 1939–40, 1945–61; actor, producer, and writer, 1934–40, 1945–54. Writer-in-residence, Hollins College, 1961–62; honorary fellow, Brasenose College, Oxford, 1966. Military service: British Royal Navy, 1940–45; became rocket ship commander.

MEMBER:Royal Society of Literature (fellow), Saville Club.

AWARDS, HONORS: Commander, Order of the British Empire, 1965; D.Litt., University of Sussex, 1970, University of Kent, 1974, University of Warwick, 1981, Oxford University, 1983, and University of Sorbonne, 1983; James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1980, for Darkness Visible; Booker-McConnell Prize, 1981, for Rites of Passage;Nobel Prize for literature, 1983, for body of work; LL.D., University of Bristol, 1984; knighted, 1988.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

Lord of the Flies (also see below), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1954, introduction by E.M. Forster, Coward (New York, NY), 1955, reprinted, Berkley (New York, NY), 2003.

The Inheritors, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1955, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1962.

Pincher Martin, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1955, new edition, 1972, published as The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1957.

(With John Wyndham and Mervyn Peake) Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination, Eyre & Spottis-woode (London, England), 1956, Ballantine (

Nobel Prize winning author Sir William Gerald Golding (1911 - 1993) is best known for his novel Lord of the Flies. However he was also awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980, for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book of the historic naval fiction trilogy To the Ends of the Earth.

During World War II, he fought in the Royal Navy and was briefly involved in the pursuit and sinking of the battleship Bismarck.  

The trilogy presents the extraordinary story of a warship's troubled journey to Australia in the early 1800s. Told through the pages of Edmund Talbolt's journal--with equal measure of wit and disdain--it records the mounting tensions and growing misfortunes aboard the ancient ship.

AOS Naval Fiction

This is a bibliography for critical work on William Golding, 2010–present. Do let us know of any omissions!

Books with references to Golding

Baker, Charley, Paul Crawford, Brian Brown, Maurice Lipsedge and Ronald Carter, Madness in Post-1945 British and American Fiction, Palgrave, 2010.

Benton, Michael, Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography. Palgrave, 2015.

Eagleton, Terry, On Evil. Yale University Press, 2010.

Etsy, Jed, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism and the Fiction of Development. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Hörschelmann, Kathrin,  and Rachel Colls, eds, Contested Bodies of Childhoodand Youth. Palgrave, 2010.

Learmonth, Eleanor, and Jenny Tabakoff, No Mercy: True Stories of Disaster, Survival and Brutality. Text Publishing, 2013.

Massie, Allan, The Novel Today: A Critical Guide to the British Novel 1970–1989. Routledge, first published 1990, ebook 2017.

Morrison, James V., Shipwrecked: Disaster and Transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, and the Modern World. University of Michigan Press, 2014.

Pick, Anat, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. Columbia University Press, 2011.

Shippey, Tom, Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction. Liverpool University Press, 2016.

Whittle, Matthew, Post-war British Literature and the ‘End of Empire’. Palgrave, 2016.

Chapters in Books

Carmagnani, Paola, ‘Lord of the Flies: William Golding’s Realism and Peter Brook’s Cinematic “Reality”.’ In Carmen Concilio and Maria Festa, eds, Word and Image in Literature and the Visual Arts, Mimesis International, 2017.

Carver, Judy, ‘William Golding’s Mother.’ In Dale Salwak, ed, Writers and their Mothers, Palgrave, 2018.

Covino, Katharine, Anna Consalvo & Natalie Chase, ‘Identifying and Interrogating Toxic Masculinity in Lord of the Flies and The Chocolate War.’