Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. His mason anxiously advises against it, for the old cathedral was built without foundations. Nevertheless, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, until the stone pillars shriek and the ground beneath it swims. Its shadow falls ever darker on the world below, and on Dean Jocelin in particular. From the author of Lord of the Flies, The Spire is a dark and powerful portrait of one man's will, and the folly that he creates.
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."
