William Golding's Lord of the Flies is one of the best-selling novels of the 20th century. It depicts the rapid descent into savagery that occurs when a group of boys is stranded on a deserted island, and offers reflections on how humans act in the state of nature. But Golding's novel is arguably just as inaccurate as it is shocking.
But Golding's novel is arguably just as inaccurate as it is shocking. Having grown tired of Victorian stories celebrating young men travelling the world and building civilization from savagery, Golding set out to write a book about "children on an island, [but] children who behave in the way children really would behave.