William Golding William Golding Sir William Gerald Golding, (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his novel "Lord of the Flies", he won a Nobel Prize in Literature and was awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1980 for his novel "Rites of Passage", the first book in what became his sea trilogy, "To the Ends of the Earth". Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, "The Times" ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
The Fox, the Flies and the Hedgehog in the neo-Latin verse of Gabriele Faerno’s fable collection (1563), which closes on the sentiment Aristotle’s version of the fable is also followed by Samuel Croxall in his prose collection of "The Fables of Æsop" (1722). The story in La Fontaine's Fables (1694) is more or less the same, except that the fox has been wounded in the chase. La Fontaine too mentions Aristotle and the political lesson that he draws, while the circumstances are repeated in Brooke Boothby’s very short poetic version. William Somervile adapted the fable more long-windedly into “The wounded man and the swarm of flies”, taking