William Golding was born in 1911 in Cornwall, England. He studied English literature at Oxford after initially considering science. He worked as a schoolteacher and served in the Royal Navy during World War II. Golding wrote his most famous novel, Lord of the Flies, in 1954 about boys marooned on an island who regress to savagery. The book was influenced by his experience in the Navy and examined humanity's inherent flaws. Golding went on to write several other novels and win the Booker Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature for his body of work examining human nature.