Lord of the Flies - by William Golding (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

William Golding's profound tale of stranded youth, survival, and the shadowy depths of human nature

A Penguin Classic

At the dawn of the next World War, a plane crash strands a group of schoolboys on a remote island. There are no grownups. No rules. Freedom is celebrated. But when strange, distant noises and visions of a beast begin to haunt the boys, their fragile order unravels, and all hopes of rescue fade.

Since 1954, William Golding's Lord of the Flies has shaped our understanding of human nature -- the latent darkness within, and the destructive or creative capacity of collective will. This edition also includes essays on reading and teaching the novel, an introduction from the 1962 edition by E. M. Forster, and notes by E. L. Epstein, scholar and book editor of the first 1959 American paperback edition, to contextualize Golding's classic as one of the most timeless and socially relevant texts in the last century of literature.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Review Quotes

"One of the most complex studies of human nature and the tendencies of societal forces ever written." --Jason Mott, National Book Award-winning author of Hell of a Book and People Like Us.

"Lord of the Flies is one of my favorite books. I still read it every couple of years."
--Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games trilogy

"I finished the last half of Lord of the Flies in a single afternoon, my eyes wide, my heart pounding, not thinking, just inhaling....My rule of thumb as a writer and reader--largely formed by Lord of the Flies--is feel it first, think about it later."
--Stephen King

"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

About the Author

William Golding (1911-1993) was born in Cornwall, England, and educated at Oxford University. His first book, Poems, was published in 1934. Following a stint in the Royal Navy and other activities during and after World War II, Golding wrote his first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), while teaching school. Many novels followed, including The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), and The Spire (1964), as well as a play, The Brass Butterfly (1958), and a collection of shorter works, The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces (1965). He received the James Tait Black Prize for Darkness Visible (1979) and the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage (1980). In 1983, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today." He was awarded the title "Companion of Literature" by the Royal Society of Literature in 1983 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988. William Golding died in June 1993 and is buried in Holy Trinity churchyard in Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, in England.

Lois Lowry is the two-time Newbery Award-winning author of Number the Stars, The Giver Quartet, and numerous other books for young adults.

Rachel Greenwald Smith is a professor of English at Saint Louis University. She is the author of On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal and Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism. Her editorial work includes American Literature in Transition: 2000- 2010 and, with Mitchum Huehls, Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture.

Jennifer Buehler is an associate professor of English educational at Saint Louis University and the author of Teaching Reading with YA Literature: Complex Texts, Complex Lives, published by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). She served as president of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of NCTE (ALAN) in 2016.