Lord of the Flies

Fülszöveg

10RD Of THE FLIES-
the story of atomic-war survivors, their struggle to
reestablish civilization, and their tragic reversion to
savagery—is now generally recognized as a modern
classic.
When the novel first appeared in 1955, it won a
devoted following but minimal sales—less than 2,500
copies. William Golding's tragic theme — the emer-
gence of the unconscious bestiality in man that has
brought genocide and possible world destruction in
this century—was at odds with the complacent tem-
per of the American 1950s. "And complacency," E. M.
Forster writes in his introduction to this new edition,
"is not a quality that Mr. Golding values."
Not until the 1959 Capricorn paper edition—and a
shift in the national mood to rigorous self-reappraisal
—did Lord of the Flies begin its extraordinary sales
ascendancy to 1.5 million copies and over 100 adop-
tions as required reading in the nation's colleges and
universities.
For partisans of the living novel, Coward-McCann... Tovább

Fülszöveg

10RD Of THE FLIES-
the story of atomic-war survivors, their struggle to
reestablish civilization, and their tragic reversion to
savagery—is now generally recognized as a modern
classic.
When the novel first appeared in 1955, it won a
devoted following but minimal sales—less than 2,500
copies. William Golding's tragic theme — the emer-
gence of the unconscious bestiality in man that has
brought genocide and possible world destruction in
this century—was at odds with the complacent tem-
per of the American 1950s. "And complacency," E. M.
Forster writes in his introduction to this new edition,
"is not a quality that Mr. Golding values."
Not until the 1959 Capricorn paper edition—and a
shift in the national mood to rigorous self-reappraisal
—did Lord of the Flies begin its extraordinary sales
ascendancy to 1.5 million copies and over 100 adop-
tions as required reading in the nation's colleges and
universities.
For partisans of the living novel, Coward-McCann
now takes pride in presenting a distinguished cloth-
bound edition of one of the key works of the twentieth
century.
A triumph of sheer narrative art, Lord of the Flies
conveys its profundity entirely through the sensory
and emotional impact of vivid storytelling. The ad-
venture of Golding's young boys—stranded on a coral
island while the rest of the world is being destroyed—
stimulates almost unbearable suspense and terror.
(continued on hack flap)
(continued from front flap)
r
On the primitive island, under the pressure of all
that is elemental and equivocal in nature, the filigree
of moral and social codes gradually crumbles away
from these sunny children, releasing something as
exotic and ominous as the jungle itself — the dark,
tangled undergrowth of the human personality. Then
begins the slide into savagery, bloodlust, mutilation,
and murder. Some of the boys cling tenaciously to
civilization, and one follows their struggle with those
who have yielded to the power of darkness as if the
destiny of our own world depended upon the outcome
of this desperate island war.
And well it may, for Lord of the Flies is a star-
tling reenactment of the tragically familiar twentieth-
century pattern of civilized society in a period of dan-
ger, terrorism, and anarchy.
William Golding has said that the novel's theme is
"an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the
defects of human nature." In thus placing squarely
on the individual the responsibility for the choice man
faces at mid-century — self-annihilation or civilized
survival — Golding went directly against the grain of
popular thought in the Fifties, a time when cultural
heroes were flawless adolescents pitted against a cor-
rupt adult world. At the opposite philosophical pole,
Golding exposes the capacity for evil in all men and
demonstrates that the shape of society depends
directly upon the ethical nature of the individual
With its moral honesty and cosmic splendor of vision,
Lord of the Flies is one of those rare books for which
the world is truly richer. Vissza