| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9781573226127 | | Publisher: Riverhead Books | | Publish Date: 8/1/1997 | | Buy.com Sku: 30302610 | | Item#: RT49WP | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 81166 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.25H x 5.5L 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) Capturing generations of readers since its publication in 1954, "Lord of the Flies" is a cult favorite among students and literary critics. An adventure tale in its purest form, this thrilling account of a group of British schoolboys marooned on a tropical island exposes the duality of human nature itself--the dark, eternal divide between order and chaos, intellect and instinct, structure and savagery.
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.
| 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 BioWilliam 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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