An Egyptian Journal - Hardcover

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Welcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961. Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993. The Double Tongue, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.

Golding's first full-length nonfiction work is an account of the 75-year-old author's month-long cruise up the Nile. ``He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience,'' warned Golding's captain; that admonition proved to be true as Golding, his wife, and four crew members went along, and the book becomes more of an adventure story than a travelogue. Its most insightful passages detail the Western writer's interactions with Egyptians, illustrating the huge differences in lifestyles; and it chronicles his thoughts as the book he expected to write changes into the book he does write, all because of those cultural divergencies. Golding's storytelling abilities, his amusing observations, and his powerful descriptions make this an informative accountnot by revealing the history, archaeology, and geology of the land as he had intendedbut through his honest and resplendent impressions of the country, its inhabitants, and its complex society. Melinda Stivers Leach, Precision Editorial Svces., Boulder, Col.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.