Lord of the Flies is one of the most popular novels ever written and one that’s been studied by schoolchildren for generations. Written by Sir William Golding and published in 1954, it tells the story of how a group of British boys try to govern themselves after their plane crash-lands on an uninhabited island, leaving them stranded.
Now, as the literary world celebrates the author’s debut novel’s 70th anniversary, an exhibition at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum within the University of Exeter is sharing a little-known early draft of the book with an alternate beginning. In this version—written on a school copybook with a torn cover—the plane the boys are on is actually shot down in battle after they are evacuated from their hometown halfway through nuclear war.
Apart from this early manuscript, the exhibition will include plenty of other noteworthy items, like letters to the Faber and Faber junior editor who first took up Lord of the Flies, as well as other material related to his later works, which went on to win him a Booker Prize and a Nobel Prize for Literature.
The exhibition runs between September 24 and December 15, 2024.
