What inspired the darkness of Lord of the Flies? The disturbing history behind the novel

William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in the shadow of the 1930s’ ideological polarisation, the Second World War and the Holocaust. These had convinced him that evil was not an aberration but was deeply ingrained in the human condition.

He recognised that the Nazis had not simply imposed their murderous regime through sheer force alone, but that millions of everyday people had acquiesced or enthusiastically gone along with it. And though many in the postwar years assured themselves that they’d never have participated in its savagery, Golding was less sanguine.

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“My book was to say: you think that the war is over and an evil thing destroyed. You are safe because you are naturally kind and decent,” he wrote while reflecting on the success of Lord of the Flies. “But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country.”

As the most destructive conflict in history gave way to the Cold War and the mounting threat of nuclear annihilation, Golding’s bleak verdict seemed apposite. In later years, he maintained that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.”

Who was William Golding?

Golding was born in 1911 in Newquay, Cornwall and raised in Marlborough, Wiltshire. He trained as a teacher, gaining first-hand insights into boys’ hierarchies and social rituals – knowledge that would later inform the tribalism in Lord of the Flies.

Serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he took part in the D-Day landings at Gold Beach in June 1944. The experience was formative, as he witnessed the machinery and the immense destructive capacity of modern warfare.

This sense that civilisation had become eclipsed was widespread, and palpable in the titles of wartime novels such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940). Everywhere, totalitarian dictators seemed to be ascendant and liberal democratic optimism in terminal decline. For Golding, the war had proved that ‘enlightened’ societies could descend into barbarism with terrifying speed.

After 1945, he returned to teaching at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury, but dreamed of becoming a published novelist. At home, he and his wife Ann would read island adventure stories to their young children. One notable example was RM Ballantyne’s imperialist romance The Coral Island (1857), in which shipwrecked boys triumph through Christian virtue and British nous.

How was Lord of the Flies written and published?

One evening, Golding jested that it would be a good idea to write a story about how a group of children would really behave under such circumstances. Encouraged by Ann, he set about exploring this idea, writing obsessively in school exercise books and borrowing the names of Ballantyne’s characters Ralph and Jack. Gradually, one of modern literature’s most unsettling novels took shape.

The novel became a deliberate inversion of the colonialist hubris that underpinned Victorian adventure stories such as The Coral Island. Where Ballantyne’s shipwrecked boys export British ‘values’ to a ‘savage’ island and emerge morally triumphant, Golding’s revert to an inherent primal savagery. Without adult supervision, the uninhabited island is a crucible in which supposedly ‘civilised’ British children succumb to superstition, destruction and terror.

Golding’s manuscript, originally titled Strangers from Within, was repeatedly turned down by London’s major publishers. By the time it had reached Faber & Faber it was already dog-eared and seemed set for yet another rejection, with one of the publisher’s readers scribbling on the accompanying cover letter: “Absurd & uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull. Pointless. Reject.”

Fortunately, up-and-coming junior editor Charles Monteith recognised its power. However, he suggested drastic changes, cutting the original opening that detailed the boys’ evacuation amid a nuclear war. The result is the eerie beginning we know today: a ‘scar’ in the jungle, a crashed plane, and only hints of a global conflict.

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Unimpressed with the novel’s working title, another Faber editor, Alan Pringle, proposed Lord of the Flies. In a letter dated 25 February 1954, Monteith shared this suggestion with Golding, writing: “It comes, of course, from one of the most important and memorable episodes in the book and we all think it’s the sort of title which would make an impression and would help the book’s sales”.

Taking its name from the demonic Philistine deity Beelzebub – whose name translates from Biblical Hebrew as ‘Lord of the Flies’ – the episode in the book to which Monteith refers sees a festering sow’s head impaled on a spike by the boys as an offering to the ‘beast’ they believe is stalking them on the island.

Lord of the Flies was finally published by Faber & Faber in September 1954, to good reviews and modest sales.

Has it been adapted before?

There have been several film versions of Lord of the Flies, each reflecting the particular anxieties of its time, though the core themes in Golding’s original work have remained consistent.

The first adaptation, directed by Peter Brook, was released in 1963 – the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Its stark black-and-white realism resonated in a world living under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, when the future of civilisation seemed terrifyingly precarious.

In 1975, a Filipino adaptation, Alkitrang Dugo (‘Asphalt Blood’), was released – tellingly, during the authoritarian rule of Ferdinand Marcos. That president, elected in 1965, declared martial law in 1972, alleging communist insurgency. The long-term dictatorship that followed was marred by censorship, the imprisonment of political opponents and widespread human rights abuses – a suitably dark context for the genesis of this adaptation.

In 1990, the story was reimagined with teenage American military cadets; this version was released just as the bipolar world order of the Cold War was coming to an end.

Now, in 2026, the first adaptation for television brings the novel to a new generation in an age marked by renewed polarisation, populism and geopolitical tensions, and when questions about social media’s impact on young people are seldom out of the news.

What is the novel’s legacy?

Golding went on to a distinguished literary career, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983 and a knighthood in 1988. He died in 1993, by which point Lord of the Flies had become a staple of classrooms worldwide. It remains a bestseller, and has been translated into numerous languages and adapted repeatedly for stage and screen.

The novel contends that civilisation is not a permanent achievement but a fragile arrangement, always vulnerable to fear and ambition.

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Perhaps its most poignant moment comes when, Jack’s tribe having set most of the island ablaze in their delirious hunt for Ralph, their bloodlust evaporates the second they come face-to-face with an adult in the shape of a Royal Naval officer.

Yet even at this moment of deliverance, Golding ends his novel on an ambiguous note. The officer, a man of war, gazes back towards his anchored cruiser – a moment that speaks to the ongoing conflict being waged away from the island by the ‘grown-ups’ whom the boys had so earnestly sought to emulate in their initial bid to maintain social harmony.

In 1965, six boys from Tonga who stole a fishing boat were shipwrecked on the uninhabited island of ‘Ata, where they survived for 15 months through cooperation, prayer and shared labour until being rescued. Their solidarity is often seen as a real-life rebuttal to the pessimism of Lord of the Flies.