John Fowles

British · 1926 to 2005

Born John Robert Fowles on March 31, 1926, in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, the only son of a tobacco importer father and a draper's daughter, he was a precocious, athletic boy who became head boy and captain of cricket at Bedford School. He served two years with the Royal Marines after the war and read French at New College, Oxford, where the reading of Sartre and Camus put him on the road to writing and away from what he later called the British Establishment young hopeful he had been. He spent a year teaching at the University of Poitiers, then took a job in 1951 at a boys' boarding school on the Greek island of Spetses, the formative years he would mine for The Magus. There he met Elizabeth Christy, the wife of a colleague, and walked her into a long and difficult marriage. They returned to England, he taught at a London language school, and on the side wrote at a furious pace. The Collector (1963), the chilling diptych of a butterfly collector and the art student he kidnaps, was a worldwide bestseller and bought him his freedom. The Magus (1965), the fevered Greek-island puzzle of masks and manipulations, became a cult book of the late sixties. The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), the Victorian Lyme Regis romance with its trapdoor metafictional endings, sold four million copies and was filmed with Harold Pinter's screenplay. He withdrew to Lyme Regis itself, curated the local museum, and wrote less and less after a stroke in 1988. Elizabeth died of cancer in 1990. He died at home on November 5, 2005, at seventy-nine.