Lord of the Flies
British first edition, 1954
Lord of the Flies (1954) is William Golding's first novel, a deeply unsettling account of a group of British schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island after their plane is shot down during a wartime evacuation. Stripped of adult authority, the boys attempt to govern themselves, and what begins as an effort at order deteriorates, step by step, into tribalism, superstition, and murder. The novel won Golding the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. British first edition, published by Faber and Faber in 1954, preceding the American edition by a year.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, red cloth-covered boards. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. Jones & Newman, Horror: The 100 Best Novels (53). #10832.
Very good in original dust jacket. The book has a slight lean, two small soil marks on the bottom edge, and light damp-staining to lower back cover. Dust jacket has a small chip at crown of spine, 2" tear along lower edge of spine, and internal damp-staining to jacket. Otherwise, jacket is very nice with only minor wear to extremities. Overall, a pleasing copy.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, red cloth-covered boards. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. Jones & Newman, Horror: The 100 Best Novels (53). #10832.
Very good in original dust jacket. The book has a slight lean, two small soil marks on the bottom edge, and light damp-staining to lower back cover. Dust jacket has a small chip at crown of spine, 2" tear along lower edge of spine, and internal damp-staining to jacket. Otherwise, jacket is very nice with only minor wear to extremities. Overall, a pleasing copy.
Additional Details
Lord of the Flies was William Golding's first novel, published by Faber and Faber in 1954 after being rejected by numerous publishers. It went on to become one of the most widely read and frequently taught novels of the twentieth century, and was cited when Golding received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983.
The setup is deliberately stripped down. A group of British schoolboys, evacuated during a wartime nuclear conflict, survive a plane crash and find themselves alone on a tropical island. There are no adults. There is no rescue in sight. The oldest boys are around twelve. In the opening chapters, they organize with surprising efficiency. Ralph, elected chief by a show of hands, establishes rules and assemblies. Piggy, physically awkward and asthmatic but the most intellectually capable of the group, becomes his adviser. The conch shell they find on the beach becomes the symbol of order. Whoever holds it has the right to speak.
Jack leads a choir who become hunters, and it is through the hunting that the novel's argument begins to develop. The pleasure of the hunt, the release of the kill, starts to pull at something in the boys that the rules cannot contain. Fear accelerates the process. A rumor of a beast on the island takes hold, and the boys, unable to verify or disprove it, find it easier to believe. The beast becomes both a genuine fear and a useful one, a thing Jack can offer protection from that Ralph's system of assemblies and signal fires cannot.
Simon, the most solitary of the older boys, has a moment of clarity the novel treats with careful ambiguity. Alone in the forest, he confronts the pig's head mounted on a stick by the hunters, which Golding calls the Lord of the Flies, and which speaks to him in a hallucination, telling him that the beast is not a creature that can be hunted. It is inside them. When Simon tries to bring this knowledge back to the group, he is killed in a frenzied ritual dance, the boys unable in the darkness and excitement to distinguish him from the thing they fear.
Piggy's death follows. He is the last voice of reason and order, and he is killed methodically, by Roger, who levers a boulder down from a height. The conch shatters at the same moment. Ralph, now hunted himself, is chased across the island, which Jack's tribe has set on fire, and runs onto the beach where a naval officer stands waiting. The officer, seeing the painted, shrieking boys, makes a light remark about a good show. Ralph weeps, and Golding writes that he wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.
The officer's ship, it is implied, is itself engaged in the adult version of the same war. The rescue is no rescue at all.
Golding wrote the novel as a direct response to R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858), a Victorian adventure story in which British boys stranded on a tropical island behave with cheerful resourcefulness and moral rectitude. He even uses the same character names, Ralph and Jack, and has the naval officer at the end compare the scene favorably to Ballantyne. The irony is the point. The Robinsonade tradition assumed that civilization was a natural condition and savagery an external threat. Lord of the Flies assumes the opposite.
The novel has been adapted for film twice, in a stark 1963 British version directed by Peter Brook, and in a 1990 American adaptation directed by Harry Hook.
The setup is deliberately stripped down. A group of British schoolboys, evacuated during a wartime nuclear conflict, survive a plane crash and find themselves alone on a tropical island. There are no adults. There is no rescue in sight. The oldest boys are around twelve. In the opening chapters, they organize with surprising efficiency. Ralph, elected chief by a show of hands, establishes rules and assemblies. Piggy, physically awkward and asthmatic but the most intellectually capable of the group, becomes his adviser. The conch shell they find on the beach becomes the symbol of order. Whoever holds it has the right to speak.
Jack leads a choir who become hunters, and it is through the hunting that the novel's argument begins to develop. The pleasure of the hunt, the release of the kill, starts to pull at something in the boys that the rules cannot contain. Fear accelerates the process. A rumor of a beast on the island takes hold, and the boys, unable to verify or disprove it, find it easier to believe. The beast becomes both a genuine fear and a useful one, a thing Jack can offer protection from that Ralph's system of assemblies and signal fires cannot.
Simon, the most solitary of the older boys, has a moment of clarity the novel treats with careful ambiguity. Alone in the forest, he confronts the pig's head mounted on a stick by the hunters, which Golding calls the Lord of the Flies, and which speaks to him in a hallucination, telling him that the beast is not a creature that can be hunted. It is inside them. When Simon tries to bring this knowledge back to the group, he is killed in a frenzied ritual dance, the boys unable in the darkness and excitement to distinguish him from the thing they fear.
Piggy's death follows. He is the last voice of reason and order, and he is killed methodically, by Roger, who levers a boulder down from a height. The conch shatters at the same moment. Ralph, now hunted himself, is chased across the island, which Jack's tribe has set on fire, and runs onto the beach where a naval officer stands waiting. The officer, seeing the painted, shrieking boys, makes a light remark about a good show. Ralph weeps, and Golding writes that he wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.
The officer's ship, it is implied, is itself engaged in the adult version of the same war. The rescue is no rescue at all.
Golding wrote the novel as a direct response to R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858), a Victorian adventure story in which British boys stranded on a tropical island behave with cheerful resourcefulness and moral rectitude. He even uses the same character names, Ralph and Jack, and has the naval officer at the end compare the scene favorably to Ballantyne. The irony is the point. The Robinsonade tradition assumed that civilization was a natural condition and savagery an external threat. Lord of the Flies assumes the opposite.
The novel has been adapted for film twice, in a stark 1963 British version directed by Peter Brook, and in a 1990 American adaptation directed by Harry Hook.
Related item
