Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of Cornwall's greatest literary sons William Golding.
Best known for his classic Lord of the Flies, he was born in Newquay and died at his home in Perranarworthal, near Truro, in 1993.
He wrote 12 novels, winning the Booker Prize in 1980 for Rites of Passage followed by the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.
Three audio snippets from the book can be heard here
Golding called himself “a universal pessimist and a cosmic optimist,” distinguishing between the universe, as the sum of man's empirical knowledge, and the cosmos, as the totality of all there is, including God and man.
He wrote about the presence of an innate evil in man underlying a veneer of civilization, concluding that man's propensity for evil is far greater than it is for goodness. Often accompanying this dominant theme was his concern with the questions of original sin and man's free will.
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