William Gerald Golding was born at St Columb Minor, Cornwall, on 19 September 1911. He died on 19 June 1993 at his home in Truro, Cornwall. His father, Alec, was a schoolteacher and his mother, Mildred, was an enthusiastic supporter of the suffragette movement. Alec Golding taught at Marlborough Grammar School and William attended this school until he went to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1930. He studied science for two years and then changed over to the study of English Literature. He graduated in 1935 and also studied for a Diploma in Education. While at Oxford he published his first book, a small volume of poems, which in later life he all but disowned. However, several of the poems share a thoughtful questioning of rational thought; a preoccupation that, as will be seen, is a constant feature of his subsequent fiction.

After Oxford, Golding worked as a teacher in the area of adult education, and also as a part-time actor, stage manager and producer; trades which are referred to in Pincher Martin. In 1939 he married Ann Brookfield, with whom he had two children and he became a teacher at BishopWordsworth's School, a grammar school in Salisbury. In December 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and served until the war ended in 1945. The war had a decisive impact on Golding as a man and as an artist. He served on mine sweepers, destroyers and cruisers, and eventually became a lieutenant, commanding his own rocket launcher. Although Golding is not a ‘war novelist’ in the conventional sense of the phrase, war provides the background to many of his novels: Lord of the Flies, Pincher Martin, Free Fall, Darkness Visible and Rites of Passage. The war forced Golding to query even more forcefully than he had done at Oxford the scientific, rationalistic, and ultimately optimistic picture of the world his father had offered him. In his essay, ‘Fable’, Golding writes of his experiences in the Second World War: ‘ I must say that anyone who moved through these years without understanding that man produces evil, as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or sick in the head.’