Part of Series
The first volume of William Golding's Sea Trilogy. Sailing to Australia in the early years of the nineteenth century, Edmund Talbot keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back in England. Full of wit and disdain, he records the mounting tensions on the ancient, stinking warship where officers, sailors, soldiers and emigrants jostle in the cramped spaces below decks. Then a single passenger, the obsequious Reverend Colley, attracts the animosity of the sailors, and in the seclusion of the fo'castle something happens to bring him into a 'hell of degradation', where shame is a force deadlier than the sea itself.
Author
People note British writer Sir William Gerald Golding for his dark novels, especially The Lord of the Flies (1954); he won the Nobel Prize of 1983 for literature. People best know this British novelist, poet, and playwright for this novel. Golding spent two years, focusing on sciences, in Oxford but changed his educational emphasis to English, especially Anglo-Saxon, literature. During World War II, he served as part of the royal Navy, which he left five years later. This experience strongly influenced his future novels. Later, he taught and focused on writing. Classical Greek literature, such as that of Euripides, and The Battle of Maldon , an Anglo-Saxon oeuvre of unknown author influenced him. College students in the 1950s and 1960s gave the attention to Lord of the Flies, first novel of Golding; their attention drove that of literary critics. He was awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage , the first book of the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth. He received knighthood in 1988. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945."
