I tell my students that past students who have success mostly have been not my "best" students but those with endurance. They hang in. Here we have a novel now considered a classic that was rejected 22 times and poorly reviewed. Golding hung in. Q.E.D.
Golding's "Jolly Good Show"
On this day in 1954 William Golding's first novel, The Lord of the Flies, was published. The novel was rejected by twenty-one publishers and had lukewarm reviews but it was immediately popular, despite its bleak view of human nature. By the sixties, it was on its way to being labeled a "cult novel," being taught in almost every high school, and bringing in enough money to enable Golding to retire from his own twenty-year career as a school teacher to write full-time. Many of Golding's other nine novels are seen as a confirmation of his view that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey," although in his 1983 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech Golding spoke differently: "Critics have dug into my books until they could come up with something hopeless. I can't think why. I don't feel hopeless myself.... I am a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist."
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