William Golding: The Faber Letters
About this ebook
Three people have been of major importance and influence in my life and you are one of them. There is a way in which I am as a writer at least partly your creation.
-- William Golding to Charles Monteith
In 1953, William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies was rescued from a 'slush pile' of unsolicited manuscripts by Charles Monteith, a new young editor at the publishing house Faber & Faber. It went on to sell over 25 million copies. Over the next forty years Monteith worked closely with Golding on every one of his novels.
These letters tell the story of their remarkable collaboration. They chart Golding's transformation from unknown middle-aged schoolmaster to knighted Nobel Prizewinner, and they tell the story of a deep and mutually rewarding friendship, as 'Dear Monteith' and 'Dear Golding' become 'Dear Charles' and 'Dear Bill'.
In this beautifully produced, stitch-bound volume, Tim Kendall draws on both public and private archives to reveal the relationship between one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and his publisher, both men who considered themselves, for different reasons, to be outsiders. Their correspondence sheds fascinating light on both the mysteries of the writing process and the vagaries of the literary world.
Generous, amusing, acerbic, intimate and often irreverent, these letters encompass gossip, reading recommendations and stories of Greek island adventures as well as detailed discussion of titles, characters and Golding's dreadful spelling.
About the author
WILLIAM GOLDING (1911-1993) was born in Cornwall and education at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, lecturer, small-boat sailor, musician and schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and took part in the D-Day operation and liberation of Holland. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, became a modern classic, selling millions of copies, and was translated into forty-four languages. It was made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding wrote eleven other novels, a play and two essay collections. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and died in 1993.
CHARLES MONTEITH (1921-1995) was born in Lisburn, County Antrim, and was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. During the Second World War he served in India and Burma with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and was badly injured. He joined Faber & Faber in 1953 and worked there for the rest of his career. As well as William Golding, he edited the works of Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, P. D. James, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, Jean Genet and Alan Bennett.
TIM KENDALL is Professor of English Literature and Director of the Centre for South West Writing at the University of Exeter. He is the author of the critical studies Paul Muldoon (1996), Sylvia Plath (2001), and Modern English War Poetry (2006), and has published a volume of poetry, Strange Land (2005).
