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Writing the first-ever biography of Nobel Prize-winning author William Golding, I was lucky enough to be able to draw on a huge collection of private papers, early versions of his books, unpublished novels, and an intimate journal, kept for 20 years, all of which had remained in the family since Golding’s death and never been released before.

Everyone remembers the scene at the end of Lord of the Flies when the naval officer and the schoolboys-turned-savages come face to face. It could be a symbol of Golding’s life, because it combines two key elements in his development. He had been a schoolmaster for 15 years, hating it, and trying in vain to get novels published, before he made his breakthrough with Lord of the Flies. In that time he learnt what boys were capable of. He would, pupils recall, provoke them to take different sides, and it could turn violent. He used fiction as a teaching aid. Being bad at keeping order, he promised his class at his first school that if they behaved well for the first half of each lesson he would tell them stories in the second half. They remember them as wild, gripping tales of fantasy and magic.

He had learnt to sail as a boy in Cornwall – his mother came from Newquay – but his serious relations with the sea began in 1940 when he joined the navy. He quickly found himself aboard the cruiser HMS Galatea, engaged in the search for the German battleship Bismarck. On watch one night near Iceland he saw, far off, the column of spray a naval shell makes hitting the water, and alerted the ship. Bells rang, gun turrets turned, and the crew sprang to action stations. Then there was a strange lull until the captain, a kind man, came across and explained that what he had seen was a whale spouting. His next assignment was aboard the destroyer HMS Wolverine, guarding Atlantic convoys. Then he was sent to New York (he managed to fit in a visit to Coney Island) to collect an American minesweeper and sail her back through the Mediterranean to Alexandria. At D-Day he commanded a rocket ship, a new, secret weapon that consisted of a tank landing craft with an extra deck over the tank space fitted with 1,000 five-inch rocket projectors. The intense heat, flame and smoke when the rockets were fired were a worry for the designers, who feared the ship might split in half. But the destruction it loosed on the enemy was prodigious. A single rocket ship was said to have the firepower of 80 light cruisers or 200 destroyers. Golding commanded another of these fearsome craft in one of the last naval engagements of the war, the Battle of Walcheren, a desperate fight against German coastal batteries in which 20 of the 27 ships in his flotilla were sunk or severely damaged and 372 men killed or wounded, many of them his friends. Memories of Walcheren haunted him all his life.

After the war he salvaged an old lifeboat which he called Seahorse, and fitted her with canvas awnings so that his wife Ann and two small children, David and Judy, could enjoy summer holidays at sea. When his books started to sell he bought Wild Rose, a 39-foot Whitstable oyster smack, which they took across to France and along the North Sea Canal to Amsterdam and the Zuider Zee. His third boat was Tenace, a 52-foot wood-built Dutch racing hoogart. She had, he said, ‘the clumsy beauty of a double bass,’ and he planned to sail her through the Mediterranean and cruise among the Greek islands. But in July 1967, the night after he set out, with Ann, Judy and four friends, they were run down in the Channel by a Japanese freighter. Tenace sank, and they were lucky to escape with their lives.

His self-confidence was always frail – adverse criticism hurt him deeply – and the loss of Tenace was a terrible blow. Throughout the 1970s he struggled against depression, alcoholism and writer’s block. But he emerged triumphant in 1979 with his great, mysterious novel Darkness Visible, and in 1983 he won the Booker Prize with Rites of Passage, the first volume of his sea trilogy, set aboard an old warship sailing to Australia at the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

Pete Townshend of The Who, who sailed with Golding, thought that the focus he showed at the helm was linked to the concentration that allowed his fiction to grow. I think sailing was also an escape and a therapy, releasing him into another element, as his imagination did. From his journal, it is clear that he lived in his imagination to an extraordinary degree. By comparison, what most people regard as the real world was relatively unimportant.

The essential Golding: read on and discover our pick of the Nobel laureate's novels