John Fowles

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John Robert Fowles

John Robert Fowles (March 31, 1926 – November 5, 2005) was an English 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 Edinburgh University, he studied at New College, Oxford, where he studied both French and German, although he dropped German and concentrated on French for his BA. After his studies, he worked as a teacher in France, Greece (where he met Elizabeth Whitton, the woman he would later marry), 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.

Belmont House - home in Lyme Regis

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.