| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780399501487 | | Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group | | Publish Date: 6/1/1959 | | Buy.com Sku: 30062972 | | Item#: R75NG6 | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 65398 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7.25H x 4.25L x 0.75T |
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| | | | "The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon..." (from the first line) The classic tale of a group of English school boys who are left stranded on an unpopulated island, and who must confront not only the defects of their society but the defects of their own natures.
Annotation:
In this now-classic tale--a terrifying variation on the traditional boys' adventure story--the brutal behavior of a group of English schoolboys left stranded on a deserted island after an atomic war is an allegory for the defects of society.
| Entertainment Reviews
 | Lord of the Flies - Book Review By: Philip Spires - Blogcritics.org Reviews Published on: 1/4/2009 5:30 PM | | A review of a book as iconic as Lord Of The Flies should surely only offer comment, not mere description. It is over 50 years since its publication in 1954 and, it should be remembered, the story is set in wartime. So, while the marooned boys apparently descend into a mold of pre-civilized behavior, their adult compatriots are engaged in it full time in the world outside. Jack may paint his face and display an identifying insignia, but so, probably, does his father at that time, a display he might call a uniform, and the insignia a flag or regimental banner. It is perhaps coincidence that William Golding casts a casualty of the nearby war, dead, but re-animated by natural elements, the wind in his parachute, as the intruding beast that terrorizes the stranded boys....read the full review |
| PraiseNew York Times Book Review
"With undertones of '1984' and 'High Wind in Jamaica', this brilliant work is a frightening parody on man's return (in a few weeks) to that state of darkness from which it took him thousands of years to emerge. Fully to succeed, a fantasy must apprach very close to reality. 'Lord of the Flies' does. It must also be superbly written. It is. If criticism must be leveled at such a feat of the imagination, it is permissible perhaps to carp at the very premise on which the whole strange story is founded." - James Stern 10/23/1955Kenyon Review
"Like any orthodox moralist Golding insists that Man is a fallen creature, but he refuses to hypostatize Evil or to locate it in a dimension of its own. On the contrary Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, is Roger and Jack and you and I, ready to declare himself as soon as we permit him to." - John Peter Autumn 1957 "The Modern Novel"
"One sees what Golding is doing. He is showing us stripped man, man naked of all the sanctions of custom and civilization, man as he is alone and in his essence, or at any rate, as he can be conceived to be in such a condition." - Walter Allen New York Review of Books
"Though much of the novel is in fact sparely and elegantly written..., there does seem to be a paint-by-numbers quality to its structure and periodically articulated epiphanies. The schoolboys...are types rather than characters....'Lord of the Flies' is a grim anti-pastoral in which adults are disguised as children who replicate the worst of their elders' heritage of ignorance, violence, and warfare." - Joyce Carol Oates 11/06/1997 |
| Author Bio| William Golding | | William Golding's father was a schoolmaster, his mother a suffragette. At the age of 12, he began writing a 12-volume epic novel that began, "I was born in the Duchy of Cornwall on the eleventh of October, 1792, of rich but honest parents." Upon graduating from Oxford, Golding taught English and philosophy at a school in Salisbury until, when World War II began, he served in the navy as a rocket ship commander. LORD OF THE FLIES, his first published novel, appeared in 1954 after being rejected by 21 publishers; Golding was 45. Thereafter, he published five novels in 10 years, to great critical and popular acclaim; then, for 15 years, he published very little, and nothing of significance, until DARKNESS VISIBLE (1979) and RITES OF PASSAGE (1980), for which he won the Booker Prize, restored his reputation. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1983. In 1961, he came to the States and spent a year as writer-in-residence at Hollins College. Golding was also an accomplished musician, playing the piano, violin, viola, cello, and oboe. He was knighted in 1988 and died of heart failure in 1993. |
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