Like many of you, I was assigned to read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in junior high. (Raise your hand if you had the one with this cov­er). Look­ing back, was there a sub­con­scious rea­son our teacher gave us this famous tale of a group of ship­wrecked chil­dren and young teens turn­ing into mur­der­ous sav­ages? Were we real­ly that bad?

Per­haps you’ve nev­er read the book and got assigned To Kill a Mock­ing­bird or Kes instead. Is Golding’s book still worth pick­ing up as an adult?

For sure, yes, and this ani­mat­ed explain­er from Jill Dash of TED-Ed hope­ful­ly will entice you do so. What it pro­vides is what we didn’t get in school: con­text.

Gold­ing had been a lieu­tenant in the Roy­al Navy dur­ing the war, and had returned to find a post-war world where nuclear anni­hi­la­tion felt pal­pa­ble. He was also teach­ing at a pri­vate school for boys. He got to won­der­ing: are we doomed as a species to sav­agery? Is war inevitable?

Gold­ing was also think­ing about the pop­u­lar Young Adult nov­els (as we now call them) of his day, because he read them to his own chil­dren. A pop­u­lar trope fea­tured young boys as cast­aways on a desert island who get up to all sorts of fun adven­tures, with a dash of British colo­nial­ism thrown in for good mea­sure. All were riffs on Daniel Defoe’s Robin­son Cru­soe.

Lord of the Flies, then, is a bru­tal satire, reduc­ing angel­ic British school­boys to a blood­thirsty mob in very lit­tle time, while in the greater world of the nov­el nuclear war rages. (Hav­ing read this dur­ing the ‘80s, the nuclear back­ground was nev­er impressed on us stu­dents. I think I would have found the nov­el even more ter­ri­fy­ing.)

It took Gold­ing ten years to find an inter­est­ed pub­lish­er, and even then it was a flop on ini­tial release. But its rep­u­ta­tion soon grew, helped by Peter Brook’s black-and-white film adap­ta­tion, and its ped­a­gog­i­cal use as an alle­gor­i­cal tale dur­ing the Cold War. It also influ­enced a gen­er­a­tion of writ­ers. Stephen King named his fic­tion­al town Cas­tle Rock after the kids’ fort in the nov­el. It also opened the door for any num­ber of Young Adult authors to deal with dark and trou­bling themes.

There were also real-world exam­ples to draw from. In the same year, 1954, as Golding’s nov­el appeared, Muzafer Sher­if’s The Rob­bers Cave Exper­i­ment was pub­lished. This was non-fic­tion, how­ev­er, detail­ing an exper­i­ment in which 22 mid­dle-class white boys were set up in two groups at a desert­ed Okla­homa sum­mer camp. With sci­en­tists pos­ing as coun­selors, they let the groups–the Rat­tlers and the Eagles–sort out their own hier­ar­chies, then set up com­pe­ti­tions.

The psy­chol­o­gists watched the arms race esca­late over the fol­low­ing days. Final­ly, one vio­lent mob brawl became so sus­tained that the researchers were forced to step in, drag the boys apart and remove them to sep­a­rate loca­tions.

How long did it take for mere fric­tion to esca­late into a juve­nile war, in an idyl­lic set­ting where every­one had plen­ty of food? Phase two last­ed just six days from the first insult (“Fat­ty!”) to the final all-out brawl. Gold­ing would have loved it.

We can see Golding’s warn­ing every­where in pop­u­lar cul­ture, from the back-bit­ing and betray­als in real­i­ty shows like Sur­vivor to hor­ror movies like The Purge. We’ve also seen the ter­rors that chil­dren can inflict on each oth­er, Columbine school shoot­ing onward. In Golding’s nov­el, the chil­dren are res­cued and revert back to a sob­bing, depen­dent state. In the real world, alas, nobody’s com­ing to save us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why You Should Read One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude: An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

How to Mem­o­rize an Entire Chap­ter from “Moby Dick”: The Art and Sci­ence of Remem­ber­ing Every­thing

Why Should We Read William Shake­speare? Four Ani­mat­ed Videos Make the Case

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Hunter S. Thomp­son died on Feb­ru­ary 20, 2005, fif­teen years ago, and ever since we’ve been won­der­ing aloud what he would make of the state of the world today. Though events have all but cried out for anoth­er Thomp­son to sav­age­ly describe and even more sav­age­ly ridicule them, what oth­er writer could live up to the for­mi­da­ble stan­dard Thomp­son set with Hell’s Angels, “The Ken­tucky Der­by Is Deca­dent and Depraved,” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and his oth­er har­row­ing gonzo-jour­nal­is­tic views of the Amer­i­can scene? These works, as the late Tom Wolfe puts it in the inter­view clip above, made Thomp­son “the great com­ic writer of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.”

Like any­one who knew the man, Wolfe had Hunter Thomp­son sto­ries. The one he tells here takes place in Aspen, Col­orado, years after Thomp­son ran for sher­iff there and near­ly won. As soon as Thomp­son and Wolfe were seat­ed at a local restau­rant, Thomp­son ordered four banana daiquiris and four banana splits.

After con­sum­ing all that, he called the wait­ress back: “Do it again.” This may remind fans of a more glut­to­nous ver­sion of the scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo threat­en­ing­ly demand an entire pie at a din­er. The real-life Thomp­son also had vora­cious appetites, not just for junk food and intox­i­cants but also for destruc­tion, as evi­denced by the sto­ry of propane-tank tar­get prac­tice John­ny Depp tells above.

Depp, who played Thomp­son in Ter­ry Gilliam’s film adap­ta­tion of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, also bond­ed with the writer in ways not involv­ing eighty-foot fire­balls. Both came from Ken­tucky, and both admired the writ­ing of the 1930s satirist Nathanael West. The two would read West­’s work aloud to one anoth­er, and lat­er Thomp­son’s own. (We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Depp read­ing the “wave speech,” Thomp­son’s best-known pas­sage, here on Open Cul­ture.) “Hunter taught me how he want­ed his work read,” Depp remem­bers, “and if there’s any­thing such as a bless­ing, that was it.” The pri­vate Thomp­son may have loved Amer­i­can prose, but the pub­lic Thomp­son loved out­ra­geous behav­ior. As John Cusack puts it in the clip above, “He was ready for a show that was beyond any sense of decen­cy and went into some absur­dist land that made your heads bend.”

Few had as much expo­sure to Th0mpson’s head-bend­ing as Ralph Stead­man, the artist whose illus­tra­tions made vis­i­ble the Thomp­son­ian “gonzo” sen­si­bil­i­ty. “Gonzo is a Por­tuguese word, and it means hinge,” Stead­man says in the news seg­ment above. “I guess to be gonzo is to be hinged — or unhinged.” The two first met at the 1970 Ken­tucky Der­by, where they were meant to col­lab­o­rate on a piece about the race. In the event, they did more drink­ing and rumor-spread­ing than report­ing, and it all led to a moment of truth: “We looked in the mir­ror and there we saw the evil face: it was us, look­ing back at us.” The final prod­uct, “The Ken­tucky Der­by Is Deca­dent and Depraved,” now looks like the birth of a form Thomp­son and Stead­man cre­at­ed, per­fect­ed, and quite pos­si­bly destroyed.

In the Joe Rogan Expe­ri­ence clip above, jour­nal­ist Matt Taib­bi describes Thomp­son’s writ­ing thus: “He let it all hang out and just said what­ev­er the hell he thought, and he let the chips fall where they may.” Easy though that may sound, in his best work Thomp­son man­aged to employ “the same tech­niques that the great fic­tion writ­ers use” to craft a “four-dimen­sion­al sto­ry, but at the same time it was also jour­nal­ism.” As the cur­rent occu­pant of Thomp­son’s old polit­i­cal-reporter job at Rolling Stone, Taib­bi knows bet­ter than any­one that “most peo­ple could­n’t get away with that.” It takes “a Mark Twain-lev­el tal­ent to do what he did, which is to mix the ambi­tion of great fic­tion with jour­nal­ism” — like most of Thomp­son’s endeav­ors, “one of those don’t-try-this-at-home things.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 11 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

John­ny Depp Reads Hunter S. Thompson’s Famous “Wave Speech” from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thomp­son Inter­views Kei­th Richards, and Very Lit­tle Makes Sense

How Hunter S. Thomp­son Gave Birth to Gonzo Jour­nal­ism: Short Film Revis­its Thompson’s Sem­i­nal 1970 Piece on the Ken­tucky Der­by

Hunter S. Thomp­son, Exis­ten­tial­ist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Find­ing Mean­ing in Life

Watch Hunter S. Thomp­son & Ralph Stead­man Head to Hol­ly­wood in a Reveal­ing 1978 Doc­u­men­tary

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.