The late Sir William Golding, who died on 19 June 1993, was one of only four English writers to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was one of the greatest novelists in the years after the Second World War, for some the greatest. He was forty-two by the time his first and most famous novel Lord of Flies was published in 1954. He went on to write another ten novels culminating in Fire Down Below (1989), which was the final novel in the trilogy of a sea journey to Australia set in the early nineteenth century. The trilogy Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below, was published in one volume in 1991 entitled To the Edge of the Earth and could be called the journey of modem man.

Golding’s second novel The Inheritors (1955) was his own favourite and the only one which he re-read. Critics regard it as his best novel, with some scholars regarding it as his most ‘perfect’ work. It complements Lord of the Flies, and the two novels together mark Golding’s ‘primitive period.’ “They deserve special reading as companion pieces.”

The Inheritors is a difficult novel and interest in Golding somewhat waned after its publication. By the time of his fourth novel Free Fall (1959) interest was reviving, and with Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors it forms a possible trilogy in which Golding explores the loss of human innocence and the consequent darkness of the human mind i.e. the emergence of evil, violence and cruelty.