Lord of the Flies

William Gerald Golding was born in Cornwall, England, in 1911 and educated at Oxford University. His first book, Poems, was published in 1934. Golding wrote his first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), while teaching school. Many novels followed, including The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), and Free Fall (1959), as well as a play, The Brass Butterfly (1958), and a collection of shorter works, The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces (1965). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Darkness Visible (1979) and the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage (1980). In 1983, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was a member of the Royal Society of Literature and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988. William Golding died in June 1993 and is buried in Holy Trinity churchyard in Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, in England.

Lois Lowry is the two-time Newbery Award–winning author of Number the Stars, The Giver Quartet, and numerous other books for young adults.

Rachel Greenwald Smith is a professor of English at Saint Louis University. She is the author of On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal and Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism. Her editorial work includes American Literature in Transition: 2000– 2010 and, with Mitchum Huehls, Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture.

Jennifer Buehler is an associate professor of English educational at Saint Louis University and the author of Teaching Reading with YA Literature: Complex Texts, Complex Lives, published by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). She served as president of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of NCTE (ALAN) in 2016.