William Golding's Lord of the Flies was written as a response to which 1857 adventure novel by R. M. Ballantyne because Golding disagreed with the views that the book held?
The Coral Island a child, Golding strongly disagreed with the views that it espoused, and in contrast "Lord of the Flies" depicts the English boys as savages themselves, who forget more than they learn, unlike Ballantyne's boys. Golding described the relationship between the two books by saying that "The Coral Island" "rotted to compost" in his mind, and in the compost "a new myth put down roots". Neither is the idyllic nature of Ballantyne's coral island to be found on Stevenson's treasure island, which is unsuitable for settlement "but exists merely as a site from which to excavate treasure, a view consistent with
The Inheritors (Golding novel) The Inheritors (Golding novel) The Inheritors is a work of prehistoric fiction and the second novel, published in 1955, by the British author William Golding, best known for "Lord of the Flies". It concerns the extinction of one of the last remaining tribes of Neanderthals at the hands of the more sophisticated "Homo sapiens". This novel is an imaginative reconstruction of the life of a band of Neanderthals. It is written in such a way that the reader might assume the group to be modern "Homo sapiens" as they gesture and speak simply among themselves, and bury their dead with