Lord of the Flies
Unlike I think a LOT of people, I didn’t have to read Lord of the Flies in high school. (I might have read it, uh, for fun. I definitely remember the ending, anyway.) But the year prior to us must have had to read it because their old schoolwork and a bunch of Lord of the Flies stuff covered the walls of the English classroom. One thing on the wall was a newspaper headline which read, I can just about remember it, “Golding’s bleak view of human nature was wrong.”
And according to this absolutely fascinating article from today, it definitely was.