文档介绍：THE ART OF FICTION NO. 109
JOHN FOWLES
John Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, on March 31,
1926. He attended Bedford School (1940–1944) and then served
nearly two years in the Royal Marines. After his four years at
Oxford (New College), where he read in French and received a
. (Honors) in 1950, Fowles turned away from his conservative
upper-middle-class background toward a new freedom and a try-
ing decade of apprenticeship as a writer. He supported himself
through teaching jobs at the University of Poitiers, at Spetsai,
Greece (where he met his wife-to-be, Elizabeth Whitton) and at
various schools in and around London until his first published
novel, The Collector, appeared in 1963. It became a best-seller,
and was made into a film by William Wyler in 1965. These suc-
cesses did not deter him from going back to earlier projects: the
philosopher’s notebook (begun at Oxford), in which he attempted
to deal with many questions pertinent to contemporary experi-
ence, was published as The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas in
1964; a first, tortured novel he wrote (inspired largely by his own
self-analysis and “conversion” to existential freedom) appeared as
The Magus in 1965. In that same year he took up residence in
Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast.
The view of Lyme Bay from Fowles’s own Belmont House is
described in the opening chapters of his most famous novel, The
French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), which won the Silver Pen
Award from PEN International and the W. H. Smith Literary
Award. The apprenticeship was over. This pseudohistorical novel
revealed a new openness to experimentation with narrative voices
and an intellectual sophistication that has marked all his later fic-
tion: The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa
(1982), and A Maggot (1985).
But Fowles the novelist, true to the humanistic tradition, has
insisted upon playing other roles. He is an imaginative historian,
an environmen