John Fowles
From Philosopedia
Fowles, John (31 March 1926- )
Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, outside London. After serving two years as a lieutenant in the Royal Marines, Fowles went to Oxford, where he graduated in 1950 with a degree in French. As a college student, he admired the French existentialists (particularly Camus and Sartre). Fowles lectured in Poitiers, France, then spent two years on a Greek island teaching English at a college. From 1954 to 1963, he taught English at St. Godric's College, London.
The success of his first published novel, The Collector (1963), permitted him the luxury of becoming a full-time writer. A disturbing tale of a young butterfly collector who decides to kidnap a woman he has a crush on was made into a 1965 film starring Terrance Stamp.
His works combine psychological probings - chiefly of sex and love - with an interest in the social and philosophical context of human behavior. The Magus, set on a Greek island with an English protagonist who teaches at a school, was published in 1966 and revised in 1977.
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) parodied early novelistic devices and described the social mores of Victorian England. It inspired a 1981 movie of the same name, starring Meryl Streep.
Daniel Martin (1977), which is semi-autobiographical, tells of Daniel Martin, the protagonist, who is an atheist.
He also wrote The Ebony Tower (1974); Mantissa (1982); and A Maggot (1985); as well as poetry.
A book of essays, Wormholes, came out in 1998. The New York Times Book Review (May 31, 1998), in reviewing Wormholes, stated,
- . . . Religion is one of several subjects (environmentalism is another) for which Fowles retires elegance in favor of the bludgeon."
In an interview by James R. Baker ("Art of Fiction"), Fowles said,
- I stay an atheist, a totally unreligious man, with a deep, deep conviction that there is no afterlife.
In his journals, Fowles acknowledges "three main politico-social obligations": "First to be an atheist."
For Fowles, “Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.”
Fowles was nominated for the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature but lost to Günter Grass.
