Lord of the Flies: A Timeless Classic of Human Nature

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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Lord of the Flies by William Golding: Review and Analysis

By the time William Golding’s typescript reached Faber and Faber in September 1953, most of Britain’s major publishers had already turned it down. A professional reader at the firm, identified by the National Library of Scotland as Polly Perkins, recommended rejection too and called it “rubbish and dull.” Charles Monteith, who had joined Faber about a month earlier, pulled it from the reject pile anyway. What he saved was Lord of the Flies, a novel that had passed ten million copies by 2015 and settled into school reading lists for good.

This review covers the author and the making of the book, the argument underneath the story, a real-life island case that readers keep setting against it, and the screen versions, including the BBC series that arrived in February 2026.

The Author and the Typescript

William Golding was born on 19 September 1911 in Newquay and died on 19 June 1993 in Perranarworthal, according to the Nobel Prize organisation. He was a schoolmaster before the war, served as a Royal Navy officer, and commanded a landing craft at Normandy in 1944. The novel took shape between 1951 and October 1952. The National Library of Scotland describes it as partly an answer to R. M. Ballantyne’s Victorian adventure story The Coral Island (1858), which Golding found unrealistic, and notes that he tried sections out on his own classes.

The first draft was titled Strangers from Within. Golding began posting it to publishers on 1 January 1953 and sent it to Faber on 14 September. Smithsonian Magazine, citing a 1993 New York Times obituary, puts the number of rejections at more than twenty; other accounts say only that most major houses declined it, so the exact count stays soft. Monteith disliked the opening, with its nuclear war and plane crash, but was gripped once the story reached the island. He asked Golding to cut three sections (a nuclear war, an aerial battle and a naval battle) and to change the character of Simon. The revisions took months and made Golding ill.

The title arrived last. Monteith’s own shortlist included This Island’s Mine, Beast in the Jungle and Fun and Games. Alan Pringle, another Faber editor, suggested Lord of the Flies, and Golding agreed in a letter dated 28 February 1954. The phrase is a literal translation of Beelzebub. Faber published the book on 17 September 1954 in a first printing of 3,000 copies that sold slowly. E. M. Forster named it his outstanding novel of the year; Golding later won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983.

Thin column of grey smoke rising from a signal fire on a rocky hilltop above a turquoise lagoon

What Happens on the Island

A plane carrying British boys during a wartime evacuation crashes on an uninhabited island. The boys are the only survivors. Ralph is elected chief and, with Piggy and Simon, tries to keep order and a signal fire burning. Jack, who leads the choir, splits off to run a hunting tribe, and fear of an imagined beast spreads through the camp. Simon is killed by boys in a frenzy. Piggy dies when Roger drops a boulder. Then the island burns, and a British naval officer arrives.

Themes and Analysis

The standard reading is order against savagery. Critics tie Ralph to civilisation and productive leadership, Jack to violence and the appetite for power, Piggy to the rational mind, Simon to spirituality, and Roger to cruelty once nothing restrains it. The props follow the same logic: the conch is read as democracy and unity, Piggy’s glasses as reason, the signal fire as the hope of rescue.

What gives the book its force is where it places the threat. The boys hunt a beast that is not there, and the one character who thinks the problem through arrives at an answer nobody wants.

“Maybe it’s only us.”

(Simon, Chapter 5. Source: LitCharts.)

Simon’s guess is the argument in miniature. Jack’s hunters began as his choir, and nothing foreign was ever introduced to the island; the darkness came ashore with the boys. That is why the ending lands the way it does. When the naval officer finds the survivors, he is embarrassed by their behaviour, even though his own warship is nearby, and the closing page gives the last word to Ralph’s grief:

“the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart”

(Narration on Ralph, Chapter 12. Source: LitCharts.)

One way to read that closing irony is that rescue undoes nothing: the adult world has a war of its own, and the officer’s ship belongs to it. Critics have also called the book cynical for treating people as selfish and violent, an objection recorded on the Wikipedia entry. The context at least explains the pessimism. A TED-Ed lesson describes the novel as a satire written after the Second World War cost Golding his faith in humanity, with nuclear destruction hanging over the Cold War. The nuclear opening that Monteith cut survives only as a faint wartime backdrop, but the question behind it, where human violence comes from, runs through every chapter.

Round wire-rimmed spectacles with a cracked lens lying in dry grass with a pinpoint of focused sunlight

The Real Island: Six Boys on ʻAta

The usual rebuttal to Golding is a true story from the Pacific. In 1965, according to Mental Floss, six boys from a Catholic boarding school in Tonga, aged 13 to 18, ran away by sea hoping to reach Fiji or New Zealand and ended up on ʻAta, an uninhabited island. Accounts of the voyage differ in detail: one has them drifting for eight days, another has a storm destroying the boat. They stayed about fifteen months.

By the same account, the boys ran the place on a schedule. There were songs and prayers, a roster for kitchen, garden and guard duty, a way to cool off after arguments, and a fire that never went out. When one boy broke a leg, the others set it with sticks and nursed him. In 1966 an Australian captain, Peter Warner, noticed signs of fire on the island from his fishing boat, and the boys ran toward him. Back in Tonga they were arrested for taking the boat. Warner sold the rights to their story to an Australian television station and used the money to bail them out.

In May 2020 a Guardian excerpt from Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History drew more than seven million hits in four days, and Bregman wrote that the case made Golding’s novel look unrealistic to him. It also drew pushback. Global Voices reported that Tongan writers objected to a version that centred the Australian rescuer, left out the island’s colonial history and carried few Tongan voices beyond Mano Totau, one of the six. A grandchild of Totau asked that nobody speak for the boys without permission.

The tidy “Golding was wrong” framing deserves the same care. A novel is a fable, not a field study, and Golding’s boys were prepubescent while the Tongans were teenagers who already knew each other from school. What the case does show is that stranded boys can organise themselves around chores and care. It does not show how any other group would behave on any other island.

Watch: TED-Ed on Lord of the Flies

Jill Dash’s animated TED-Ed lesson runs about four and a half minutes and frames the novel as a satire shaped by Golding’s wartime disillusionment:

On Screen: From Brook to the BBC

Peter Brook directed a film version in 1963 and Harry Hook another in 1990. The Royal Shakespeare Company staged Nigel Williams’s adaptation in July 1995. Faber marked the 70th anniversary in 2024 with a deluxe edition, and a graphic novel adapted and illustrated by Aimée de Jongh appeared the same year.

The newest version is Jack Thorne’s four-part BBC series, directed by Marc Munden and described by the Royal Television Society as the first television adaptation of the novel. It was made with the blessing of Golding’s estate. All four episodes arrived on BBC iPlayer on 8 February 2026, with weekly broadcasts on BBC One. Each episode takes a character’s name (Piggy, Jack, Simon, Ralph) and follows that character’s perspective. The ensemble numbers more than thirty boys, many in their first screen roles, with Winston Sawyers as Ralph, Lox Pratt as Jack, David McKenna as Piggy and Ike Talbut as Simon.

Reviews were largely strong, though The Guardian and the Financial Times gave three stars each, according to the Wikipedia summary of the critical response. The same page records that Netflix took the US rights and released the series there on 4 May 2026.

Single conch shell on wet sand at the tide line at blue hour

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Lord of the Flies based on a true story?
No. Golding invented the plot, and the book appeared in 1954. The real case of six Tongan boys on ʻAta, covered above, happened in 1965 and is often set beside it for comparison.

What does the title mean?
It is a literal translation of Beelzebub, a name for the devil. Alan Pringle, an editor at Faber, suggested it, and Golding approved it in February 1954.

How many publishers turned it down?
No exact count has been verified. Smithsonian Magazine cites a 1993 New York Times obituary for more than twenty rejections, while the National Library of Scotland says only that most major British publishers had declined it by September 1953.

Is it on school reading lists?
Widely. A 2016 UK poll ranked it third among the nation’s favourite school books, behind Animal Farm and Great Expectations. It also appeared on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990 to 1999.

Does Piggy have a real name?
The book never gives one.

Where to Read It

Lord of the Flies by William Golding (affiliate link) is short and quick to read, which helps explain why it stays a school staple.

Further Reading

Sources

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