About the author
William Golding was a British novelist, poet, and playwright who received the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. His fiction repeatedly strips away social arrangements to examine authority, fear, violence, belief, and the stories groups use to justify themselves.
The unraveling comes from within. Jack, the choir leader, discovers that hunting is more fun than keeping the fire alive, and that face paint frees him from embarrassment. Fear of a beast on the mountain does the rest. Golding tracks the slide from assembly to tribe to something worse with the inevitability of a proof — each step is small, and each is chosen.
Where to start
Start with Lord of the Flies. Schoolboys stranded on an island build a society, then tear it apart.
