Lord of the Flies

William Golding began writing Lord of the Flies in 1951 while teaching at Bishop Wordsworth's School, a boys' grammar school in Salisbury, England. Golding's World War II Royal Navy service—including commanding a rocket-launching craft during the 1944 D-Day landings—deeply shaped his view of humanity's capacity for cruelty and moral collapse. The novel was conceived as an ironic, darker satire of R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1858), which portrayed stranded British boys thriving through inherent virtue. After rejections from multiple publishing houses and an initial rejection by Faber's own reader, the manuscript was rescued from the slush pile in 1953 by young editor Charles Monteith, who worked with Golding on significant revisions before its 1954 release. Stranded on an uninhabited Pacific island after a plane crash with "No grownups!", a group of English schoolboys attempts self-governance under elected chief Ralph, using a conch shell as a symbol of democratic order. The narrative tracks the fracture between Ralph/Piggy (reason, rescue, rules) and Jack Merridew's choirboy hunters (tribalism, ritual violence, immediate gratification), culminating in the murders of Simon and Piggy.