William Golding

With his examinations of humanity's baser nature, novelist William Golding was regarded as one of the greatest authors of the 20th century. Following studies at Oxford's Brasenose College and years of harrowing duty during World War II, Golding published his first novel, Lord of the Flies in 1954. A dark allegory of mankind's propensity for evil, it established him as a literary icon and became required reading in classrooms around the world. He later imagined a pivotal moment in human evolution with the novel The Inheritors in 1955 and plumbed the deepest recesses of a man's psyche in the 1956 survival tale Pincher Martin. With his list of works and reputation growing, Golding reached an even wider audience via director Peter Brook's acclaimed feature adaptation of "Lord of the Flies" (1963). After a pair of novels in the mid-'60s, Golding experienced a period of writer's block for much of the next decade, until he returned with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize-winning Darkness Visible (1979). Reinvigorated, Golding soon followed with Rites of Passage, which earned him the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature and began his epic To the Ends of the Earth trilogy. A decade later, his most famous work, "Lord of the Flies" (1990) was filmed once again, while the ambitious miniseries "To the Ends of the Earth" (PBS, 2005) proved an admirable adaptation of his epic trilogy. A generation later, Golding's dark fables of human frailty still held the power to provoke and entertain.