“Flies” Author Admits Rape Attempt
The Nobel laureate Sir William Golding, whose novel “Lord of the Flies” turned notions of childhood innocence on their head, admitted in private papers that he had tried to rape a 15-year-old girl during his teenage years. Golding’s papers also described how he had experimented, while a teacher at a public school, with setting boys against one another in the manner of “Lord of the Flies,” which tells the story of young air crash survivors on a desert island during a nuclear war. It was made into a chillingly good 1960 movie by Peter Brook, and re-made into a chillingly bad picture in 1990.
