06/20/2022
"In Rites of Passage he looped through the period’s floridly evasive literary style with such brio that the writing must have been play. Yet probably few readers understand the kind of stress that results from sustained intense use of the imagination. Golding was not an easy writer nor an easy man. No more was he a model human—he was a drinker and a difficult personality as well as an extraordinarily good writer; not incompatible traits as a scan of literary figures proves. But his imagination was powerful and terrible and personal. It could belong to no one else and it made him a significant voice in twentieth century literature."
William Golding had a fantastic imaginative ability that allowed him into humanity’s more unsavory byways; his vast reading aided a remarkable ear for language that let him hit the clear, perfect n…
