William Golding was a 42-year-old schoolteacher, bruised by multiple rejections from publishers, when the manuscript of Lord of the Flies was salvaged from Faber's reject pile by an editor who had only been in the business for a month.
Biographer John Carey explains why Golding came to hate the book that made his fortune. He also discusses the troubled personality of a writer who described himself as "a monster in thought, word and deed", and explores the contradictions of someone who hated exposure in his lifetime but left millions of self-lacerating words for posterity to judge – including an account of the day he attempted to "rape" a 15-year-old schoolgirl.
