John Fowles

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John Robert Fowles

John Robert Fowles (March 31, 1926 – November 5, 2005) was a British novelist and essayist.

He was born in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, England, the son of Robert J. Fowles, a prosperous cigar merchant, and his wife, Gladys Richards, a schoolteacher. After attending Bedford School and New College, Oxford, where he studied French and German, he worked as a teacher in France, Greece and England. The success of his first published novel, The Collector (1963), meant that Fowles was able to stop teaching and start a literary career.

In 1968 Fowles moved to Lyme Regis in Dorset and used it as the setting for The French Lieutenant's Woman. In that same year he adapted The Magus (a novel based on his experiences in Greece and written before The Collector) for cinema, but the film was not a success. The French Lieutenant's Woman was made into a film in 1981 with a screenplay by the British playwright Harold Pinter (subsequently a Nobel laureate in Literature) and was nominated for an Oscar.

Fowles' best-known non-fiction work is probably The Aristos, a collection of philosophical reflections. Many critics now consider him a forefather of British postmodernism.

Fowles died at his home in Lyme Regis on November 5, 2005, after a long illness.

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