About the Author

Born in Cornwall, England, in 1911 and educated at Oxford University, William Gerald Golding's first book, Poems, was published in 1935. Following a stint in the Royal Navy and other diversions during and after World War II, Golding wrote Lord of the Flies while teaching school. This was the first of several novels including Pincher Martin, Free Fall, and The Inheritors and a play, The Brass Butterfly, which led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.
Stephen King, the world's bestselling novelist, was educated at the University of Maine at Orono. He lives with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King, and their children in Bangor, Maine.

Reviews

"Lord of the Flies is one of my favorite books. That was a big influence on me as a teenager, I still read it every couple of years." 
—Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games

"As exciting, relevant, and thought-provoking now as it was when Golding published it in 1954."
—Stephen King

"The most influential novel...since Salinger's Catcher in the Rye." 
—Time

"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 approach very close to reality. Lord of the Flies does. It must also be superbly written. It is." 
—The New York Times Book Review
 
"Sparely and elegantly written...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, New York Review of Books