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What Do I Read Next?
(Novels for Students)
- Euripides's ancient Greek tragedy The Bacchae, (405 BC), whose influence on Lord of the Flies is widely acknowledged, dramatizes the influence of the worship of Dionysus on the city of Thebes. In the play, King Pentheus tries to stop the Bacchantes' Dionysian ceremony and as a result is taken for a wild animal and killed by his mother.
- Just as Lord of the Flies is a post-World War II response to R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island, so Golding's next novel, The Inheritors (1955), is a realistic response to H. G. Wells's optimistic theory of history as propounded in his Outline of History.
- Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945), like Lord of the Flies, is an allegory influenced by its author's war experiences, and one that probes the nature of man and his attempts to form a just society.
- The view of man and society in J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951), in which a psychologically convalescing young man looks back on his experiences, has often been contrasted with the perspective of Golding's novel, and both books have been campus favorites at different times.
- Praised for its style of its prose, Marianne Wiggin's 1989 novel John Dollar has been described as a "girl's version" of Lord of the Flies. Set in the 1910s, the novel follows a group of girls and their blinded schoolmistress who are stranded on an island near Burma after a storm.