William Golding

Golding taught English and philosophy at a Salisbury school through the 1930s before the Second World War, in which he served in the Royal Navy, commanding a rocket-launching craft and taking part in the D-Day landings, combat experience he later said convinced him that civilization's veneer over human cruelty was desperately thin. He returned to teaching afterward and wrote Lord of the Flies in his spare evenings; it was rejected by more than twenty publishers before Faber accepted it in 1954.

The novel's marooned schoolboys descending into savagery became one of the most widely taught books of the century. Golding left teaching to write full time, won the Booker Prize in 1980 for Rites of Passage, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, honored for novels that, the citation said, illuminate the human condition in the world today.