On this day in 1954 William Golding's first novel, The Lord of the Flies, was published. The novel was rejected by twenty-one publishers and had lukewarm reviews but it was immediately popular, despite its bleak view of human nature. By the sixties, it was on its way to being labeled a "cult novel," being taught in almost every high school, and bringing in enough money to enable Golding to retire from his own twenty-year career as a school teacher to write full-time. Many of Golding's other nine novels are seen as a confirmation of his view that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey," although in his 1983 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech Golding spoke differently: "Critics have dug into my books until they could come up with something hopeless ... FULL STORY »
