Bloody Cavemen
2 days ago
- The Coral Island (1857) promoted Victorian ideals of boyhood, while Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) subverted this myth by depicting savage schoolboys rescued from each other by the Royal Navy.
- Golding struggled for years to publish his novel, facing multiple rejections until Charles Monteith at Faber & Faber championed it after significant editorial revisions (trimming the opening, adjusting tone, and making Simon less overtly Christ-like).
- Monteith's edits were crucial to the novel's sleekness and popularity, shifting the power dynamic between author and editor over time.
- Golding's later novels (The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, The Spire, Darkness Visible, Rites of Passage) were more experimental and less commercially successful, but he won the Booker, Nobel, and a knighthood.
- The correspondence between Golding and Monteith reveals Golding's financial anxieties, ego management by Monteith, and their evolving relationship, including Monteith's own struggles with homophobic harassment.