SPIRE - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571307825 ISBN 13: 9780571307821

Publisher: FABER & FABER LTD (ENGLAND), 1738

Synopsis

Spire

About this title

About the Author

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Walcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961. Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993. The Double Tongue, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995., William Golding (1911-1993) was a Booker and Nobel Prize winning author, best known for his first novel, Lord of the Flies, published originally in 1954 and adapted for film in 1963. His other works include The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Rites of Passage (1980), The Double Tongue (published posthumously in 1995) a now rare volume, Poems (1934) and the essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target.
Golding was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before his writing career, Golding was a schoolmaster. He was also a keen actor, musician and small-boat sailor.
In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

John Mullan is Professor of English at University College London. He is the author of How Novels Work (OUP) and Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eightenth Century (OUP). He has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. A broadcaster and journalist as well as an academic, he writes a weekly column on contemporary fiction for The Guardian.

Review

In the 14th century, when men broke their backs and lost their lives toiling with stone to build the great cathedrals, Den Jocelin is visited by an angel who tells him to erect a spire upon a building that has no foundations. Despised as a lunatic and self-deceiver, Jocelin's will forces the spire upwards, course by course, until the pillars begin to sing and the earth to crawl. Golding's exposition of one man's struggle with the noble and ignoble sides of his nature confirmed him in 1964 as a writer of fantastic imaginative power, and the magic of this book is still extraordinarily potent to me today. (Kirkus (UK))

About this edition

• Publisher: FABER & FABER LTD (ENGLAND)
• Publication date: 1738
• ISBN 10: 0571307825
• ISBN 13: 9780571307821
• Binding: Paperback