Given such events, as well as the two world wars and the Holocaust, it is not surprising that some writers looked back on the mid-twentieth century and saw in it an unanswerable refutation of the entire humanist worldview. The novelist William Golding said of the Second World War that “anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.” His nihilistic and grotesque fable Lord of the Flies, depicting the moral degeneration of a group of boys stranded on a remote island, was an expression of that
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