Lord of the Flies Was Rejected 20 Times
Quick answer: Lord of the Flies was rejected about 20 times and dismissed as rubbish by a publisher's reader. How one editor saved it and Golding won the Nobel.
In September 1953, at the London offices of Faber and Faber, a professional manuscript reader picked up a grubby, much-travelled typescript called Strangers from Within, by an unknown Wiltshire schoolmaster. Her report, preserved in the firm's files and quoted ever since, dismissed the book as an absurd and uninteresting fantasy, rubbish, dull and pointless, and recommended rejection. The typescript had already been turned down across London; the widely reported count runs to about twenty publishers and agents.
That manuscript was Lord of the Flies. Its author, William Golding, would win the Booker Prize in 1980, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, and a knighthood in 1988. The distance between the reader's verdict and the Nobel citation is the whole story, and it turns on one new employee who fished the typescript back out of the pile.
A schoolmaster with a dark idea
Golding taught English and philosophy at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury, an ordinary grammar-school job he held for years. The war sat behind everything he wrote: he had served in the Royal Navy through the Second World War, commanding a rocket-firing landing craft that supported the D-Day operations, and he said in later essays that the war destroyed his belief in human innocence. He had watched what ordinary, educated people could do.
The idea for the novel came out of the polite island adventures he read aloud at home, books where shipwrecked British boys behave splendidly. The story widely told, from Golding's own account, is that he asked his wife Ann whether it might be a good idea to write about boys on an island behaving as boys actually would. She thought it might. He drafted the book around a full teaching timetable through 1952 and 1953, in exercise books and stolen hours, a working teacher writing against the grain of his own days.
Twenty doors, all closed
Strangers from Within went out to publisher after publisher through 1953 and collected rejections at a rate that would cure most people of the habit. The commonly reported figure is around twenty refusals before it reached Faber and Faber, and by then the typescript itself was visibly tired, dog-eared from its journeys. The objections were not insane: the book opened with a long, slow section about an atomic war and an evacuation, its subject was grim, and its author had no name to sell.
At Faber the manuscript met the in-house reader whose damning one-line verdict has become one of publishing's most quoted internal documents. By every normal mechanism of the industry, the book was finished.
The new man at Faber
Charles Monteith had been at Faber and Faber for only a matter of weeks. A former barrister with no publishing track record, he pulled the rejected typescript from the pile, read past the deadly opening, and found the island. He argued the book's case to the board and won it a contract for a modest advance, widely reported as sixty pounds.
His conditions were not gentle. Monteith asked Golding to cut the entire opening section about the atomic war, along with other framing material, so that the novel now begins where readers remember it beginning: boys on a beach, no explanations. The title changed too, since Strangers from Within would not do; the book went into the world in September 1954 as Lord of the Flies. Golding, twenty rejections deep, might have defended every page. Instead he cut. The willingness to lose a beloved opening is a large, unglamorous part of why the book exists.
The slow climb to classic
Publication did not transform Golding's life overnight. Reviews in Britain were respectful, and the book gained a decisive early champion when E. M. Forster named it an outstanding novel of its year, a widely reported endorsement that mattered in literary London. The first American edition in 1955 sold poorly. What changed everything was the paperback: through the late 1950s and 1960s the novel spread through schools and universities, first in America and then everywhere, until it became one of the most assigned novels in the English language.
Golding kept his teaching job until the early 1960s, nearly a decade after publication. The later honours arrived in a rush by comparison: the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980, the Nobel in 1983, the knighthood in 1988. The Faber reader's report and the Nobel citation now describe the same writer.
Why the turn happened, honestly
Count the contingencies. If Monteith had joined Faber a month later, if the typescript had gone out once less, if Golding had refused the cuts, the book plausibly dies in a drawer. Luck is real in this story and should be named: one fresh reader arrived at the right desk at the right time.
But the luck had two preconditions Golding controlled. The manuscript was still circulating after roughly twenty rejections, because he kept sending it. And when the one interested editor asked for radical surgery, the author said yes. Persistence got the book to Monteith; flexibility got it past him. Neither quality alone would have been enough, which is worth remembering when writers treat stubbornness itself as the virtue.
What a working writer can take from this
Rejection measures fit, not worth. Twenty professional readers were not wrong about their own lists and their own markets; they were wrong about the book's ceiling, which is a different judgment nobody can make reliably. Your twentieth rejection tells you the same thing your first did, almost nothing, and the twenty-first reader may be a Monteith. The practical implication is brutally simple: the work must stay in circulation, because editors cannot rescue manuscripts they never receive. That is half the argument for contest deadlines; Writory reads and scores every single entry each month, so a poem's fate is never decided by an unopened pile.
And when a serious reader asks for a serious cut, audition the idea before defending the pages. Golding lost his opening chapters and gained a first page that generations of readers know by heart. The material you love most is not always load-bearing.
Reading Golding as a writer
Read Lord of the Flies for its control of escalation: how small breaches of order, a broken conch rule here, a face painted there, compound into catastrophe without a single implausible step. Then try The Inheritors, his 1955 novel told largely through the perceptions of Neanderthals, one of the boldest point-of-view experiments in English fiction, and Pincher Martin, which rewires its own story in the final page. Golding rewards writers because his effects are structural; you can see the joinery.
What poets can take from this
- Keep a manuscript in circulation until someone with a chequebook says yes; verdicts expire, files do not.
- When an editor proposes a deep cut, try it in a copy before you argue.
- Write around your day job rather than waiting to be free of it; Golding taught for years after publication.
- Do not open with the explanation; Monteith's cut is a lesson in starting inside the story.
- Collect your rejections without ceremony and log the next destination the same day.
- Let one trusted champion's enthusiasm outweigh a stack of form refusals.
Try it yourself
Take a draft you care about and delete its entire opening section, starting instead at the first moment of concrete action. Write the new first paragraph the cut demands.
Questions
How many times was Lord of the Flies rejected?
The widely reported figure is around twenty rejections from publishers and agents before Faber and Faber took it in 1953. Even at Faber, an in-house reader initially dismissed it as rubbish; the new editor Charles Monteith rescued it from the rejection pile.
What was the original title of Lord of the Flies?
Golding submitted it as Strangers from Within. During editing at Faber and Faber the opening section about an atomic war was cut and the book was retitled Lord of the Flies, appearing under that name in September 1954.
Did William Golding win the Nobel Prize?
Yes. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, nearly thirty years after Lord of the Flies was published. He had also won the Booker Prize in 1980 for Rites of Passage and was knighted in 1988.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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