The Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies is a 1954 novel by Nobel Prize-winning English author William Golding about a group of British boys stuck on an uninhabited island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results.

The dystopian society is about a group of boys from England who find themselves stuck on a deserted island and attempt to govern themselves. 

The novel speaks on the subject of human nature and individual welfare for the common good. The book earned the sixty eighth spot on the top one hundred most frequently challenged books of the 1990s by the American Library Association (resulting in it being considered a banned book). The book was Golding’s very first novel and it was not very popular at all; it only sold less than three thousand copies in 1955 before going out of print.

However, it soon became a best-seller and has since been adapted twice to film - once in 1963 and then again in 1990. The book was chosen in 2005 for a list of the best one hundred novels in the English language by TIME magazine written from 1923 and 2005. It is number forty one on the editor’s list of Modern Library 100 Best Novels and number twenty five on the reader’s list. In 2003, the book was listed as number seventy on BBC’s The Big Read survey. 

Additional reading: Click here to read a literary analysis of the novel.