‘Lord of the Flies’ Comes to Television for the First Time in a New Miniseries. In the 1950s, the Now-Famous Novel Almost Never Got Published

Publishers rejected the original manuscript for “Lord of the Flies” many times, yet the story still sparks a buzz today. Author William Golding later won the Nobel Prize in Literature

May 6, 2026 10:07 a.m.

A new adaptation of William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies is airing on Netflix for U.S. audiences. The four-part miniseries, written by Jack Thorne and originally aired by BBC, follows a group of schoolboys stranded on a deserted island as their efforts to govern themselves unravel into savagery.

“It is the book that changed me,” Thorne, who first read Lord of the Flies at age 11, tells NPR’s A Martínez and Ava Pukatch. It’s a “specific portrayal of damage that really fascinates me.”

Though Lord of the Flies is set between World War II and the Cold War, the book’s themes—masculinity, loss of innocence, and human nature, to name a few—have transcended time and placed it in the literary and cultural conversation for decades, inspiring authors from Stephen King to Suzanne Collins.

But despite the enduring resonance of Golding’s novel, the tale of Jack, Ralph, Simon and Piggy almost never saw the light of day. According to Golding’s 1993 obituary by the New York Times’ Bruce Lambert, the novel was rejected more than 20 times before Faber & Faber gave it a chance. And even then, it was a matter of falling into the right hands.

“Absurd & uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull. Pointless,” a reader at Faber & Faber wrote on Golding’s manuscript in 1953 before labeling it a reject, according to Faber & Faber: the Untold Story.

Golding began writing Lord of the Flies, originally titled Strangers From Within, in 1951 while working as a teacher at a school in Salisbury, England. He was in his 40s and still haunted by his memories of World War II, when he served in the British Navy. According to BBC News’ Greg McKevitt, Golding wrote much of the original manuscript by hand during his students’ work time. “A few of them were tasked with counting the number of words he’d written per page,” McKevitt wrote in 2024.

In its original version, Strangers From Within leaned heavily religious and included far more war-related detail, which muddled its efforts at subverting the desert island narrative to warn about the tendencies of human nature.

Golding shipped the manuscript off to major publishers, who sent it back appended with rejection letters, before mailing the increasingly battered and coffee-stained document to Faber & Faber. After initially facing another slush pile, Charles Monteith, who had just joined the publishing house, picked it up.

“I had a look, and I must say I wasn’t at all attracted by the beginning of it, but eventually I went on and got absolutely caught up by it,” Monteith told BBC’s Bookmark in 1984. “And from then on, I said ‘we must take this seriously.’”

But Monteith still required edits from Golding paring down details of the war and changing the title. And Simon, a spiritual, near-mystic character in the original draft, was amended into the aloof, introspective and more secular moral character that readers know today. With these changes, Monteith convinced Faber & Faber to publish the book in 1954.

It was the beginning of a long relationship between the two, with Monteith guiding Golding’s next novels. “I am as a writer at least partly your creation,” Golding later told Monteith, according to the Spectator’s Oliver Soden.

Did you know? ‘Writer of myths’

William Golding won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature. The citation called him a “writer of myths,” noting that “Golding has a very keen sight and sharp pen when it comes to the power of evil and baseness in human beings—just like Jonathan Swift. And like Herman Melville, he often chooses his themes and the framework for his stories from the world of the sea, or from other challenging situations in which odd people are tempted to reach beyond their limits, thereby being bared to the very marrow.”

Sales for Lord of the Flies dragged for the first years of publication, but enthusiasm for the book rose in the U.S. after a 1959 paperback release. Lord of the Flies was reprinted in several versions, adapted into a movie shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1963, and became required reading for many school children.

It is also continually revisited by grown-up critics and literature-lovers, comparing the book’s time-tested motifs with the dilemma of the day. For Thorne’s new series, this means exploring the complexity of masculinity, which he also probed in last year’s critically acclaimed series Adolescence.

Thorne intentionally takes a tender approach to the characters, reviewers say, and each episode of his Lord of the Flies series focuses on one of the boys—Piggy, Jack, Simon and, finally, Ralph. Thorne’s writing emphasizes the role of the boys’ fathers in shaping their choices, and pays sympathetic attention to Jack, who takes the most violent actions in the story. It’s a choice Thorne believes Golding, who ruminated over these characters for decades after he wrote them, may have approved.

“By giving the different boys space, by spending time with their personality and understanding them, we think that can even further deepen what Golding was doing,” Thorne tells Backstage’s Derek Lawrence.

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