We’ve Become Too Savage for ‘Lord of the Flies’

Mr. Díaz is a professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, most recently, of “Islandborn.” He writes the StoryWorlds newsletter on Substack.

Back in my school days, William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” was ubiquitous, an almost inescapable rite of passage, and while the novel is still on shelves, kept there as much by its Nobel pedigree as its length, Golding’s island has been on the wane for some time.

After all, few novels from the ’50s have aged well in a non-reading, present-obsessed conjuncture. This novel’s dystopic vision of human barbarity might have been stiff stuff in Ye Olden Times (1954), but in these days of school shootings and soaring teen suicide rates, the travails of Piggy and Company come off a........

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