The Day x Connell Guides - The Connell Guide to William Golding's The Lord of the Flies

“This beautiful and desperate book, something quite out of the ordinary,” said the poet Stevie Smith of Lord of the Flies when it first appeared in 1954. William Golding’s extraordinary first novel quickly became a worldwide publishing phenomenon, and by the early 1960s had begun to replace Catcher in the Rye as the bible of the American adolescent. The celebrated critic John Carey is the world’s foremost authority on Golding’s work and, as his official biographer, has had unique access to his family archives. In this short, lucid guide, he explains what makes Lord of the Flies so compelling and why it has had such a lasting impact.