John Fowles
John Robert Fowles was born March 31, 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town located about 40 miles from London in the county of Essex, England. He recalls the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles says "I have tried to escape ever since."
Fowles attended Bedford School and the University of Edinburgh. Fowles began compulsory military service and within two years was promoted to lieutenant, and he was at II World War.
Fowles then spent four years at Oxford, where he discovered the writings of the French existentialists. He admired Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose writings corresponded with his own ideas about conformity and the will of the individual. He received a degree in French in 1950 and began to consider a career as a writer and he worked as a teacher.
The time spent in Greece was of great importance to Fowles. During his tenure on the island he began to write poetry and to overcome a long-time repression about writing. Between 1952 and 1960 he wrote several novels but offered none to a publisher, considering them all incomplete in some way and too lengthy.
His works:The Collector,The Aristos, Daniel Martin, Poems, Mantissa
The Magus has perhaps generated the most enduring interest, becoming something of a cult novel, particularly in the U.S.
With parallels to Shakespeare's The Tempest and Homer's The Odyssey, The Magus is a traditional quest story made complex by the incorporation of dilemmas involving freedom, hazard and a variety of existential uncertainties. Fowles compared it to a detective story because of the way it teases the reader: "You mislead them ideally to lead them into a greater truth...it's a trap which I hope will hook the reader," he says.
The most commercially successful of Fowles' novels, The French Lieutenant's Woman, appeared in 1969. Since 1968, Fowles has lived on the southern coast of England in the small harbor town of Lyme Regis (the setting for The French Lieutenant's Woman). His interest in the town's local history resulted in his appointment as curator of the Lyme Regis Museum in 1979, a position he filled for a decade.