John Fowles

Fowles, John - 1926–, English novelist, b. Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, grad. Oxford, 1950. Fowles is a complex, cerebral writer, interested in manipulating the novel as a genre. His first novel, The Collector (1963), is a study of a clerk who is psychologically impelled to kidnap and murder—that is, "collect"—a girl to whom he is attracted. The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) is a "Victorian" novel that has three endings; it reflects contemporary self-consciousness about nineteenth-century England and the form of the novel itself. He has also written The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas (1964); The Ebony Tower (1974), a collection of stories; and the novels The Magus (1966, revised 1977), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), and A Maggot (1985).

See studies by P. Wolf (1979), C. M. Barnum (1988), and K. Tarbox (1989).

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