The Paper Men

The Paper Men

by WilliamGolding (Author)

Synopsis

This powerful, original, and, above all, unpredictable novel pits Wilfred Barclay, a famous but failing British novelist, against Rick L. Tucker, an obscure American academic whose escape from scholarly oblivion hinges on becoming the Barclay Man: biographer, editor of the posthumous papers and the recognized authority. Barclay's slide into destructive drinking, marital failure, and middle-aged lust is alternately pandered to and documented by the indefatigable Tucker. Locked in a lethal relationship of mutual dependence, the two men totter on the brink of physical, emotional, and spiritual chasms, their hatred of each other and themselves growing as they lose their wives, their self-respect, and their illusions. Golding's deceptively comic touch heightens the stunning impact of a climax that is as inevitable as it is unexpected.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 192
Edition: Second Edition.
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 04 Feb 1985

ISBN 10: 0571134475
ISBN 13: 9780571134472
Book Overview: Author won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983

Author Bio
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.