Introduction

Abstract

Between 1952 and 1955 a number of new and articulate voices in British fiction began to claim public attention. For several years before, commentators had speculated about where or what the new generation was, wondered how the Second World War might be treated in serious fiction and worried that fatigue or public austerity might have been instrumental in a premature atrophy among the potentially creative. When their fiction reached enthusiastic public notice, in the early 1950s, the work of Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch, John Wain, Doris Lessing, Angus Wilson (who was slightly older but did not publish a novel until 1952), Thomas Hinde and Philip Larkin (who had written two novels in the late 1940s before publishing his poetry) began to be regarded as representative of a new postwar generation. In the initial and often superficial responses to their fiction, the new voices emerging from the war seemed to many comic and limited, often insular, interested in questions of food and class, and influenced, in one way or another, by a vaguely Sartrean or existential version of experience. For good or ill, depending on the point of view, and most often for both good and ill, they did not seem to demonstrate much concern with eternal verities or transforming visions of human experience. Alone among these emerging writers, although eventually noticed nearly as much as any of them, William Golding, from the appearance of Lord of the Flies in 1954, was seen as a visionary dealing with universal and essential human issues, was not part of a group or a generation. Somewhat older than the others (although only two years older than Angus Wilson), Golding seemed an anomaly among the novelists of the early and middle 1950s. For some, in both England and America, Golding was immune from the dominant temper of the age, from the bland muted, non-charismatic, comic safety of