John Robert Fowles was an English novelist of international renown, critically positioned between modernism and postmodernism.
21 Facts About John Fowles
2.
John Fowles's work was influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, among others.
3.
John Fowles's books have been translated into many languages, and several have been adapted as films.
4.
John Fowles was an only child until he was 16 years old.
5.
John Fowles became head boy and was an athletic standout: a member of the rugby football third team, the fives first team, and captain of the cricket team, for which he was a bowler.
6.
John Fowles completed his training on 8 May 1945 and was then assigned to Okehampton Camp, Devon, for two years.
7.
John Fowles has commented that the ambience of Oxford at the time, where such existentialist notions of "authenticity" and "freedom" were pervasive, influenced him.
8.
In 1951, John Fowles became an English master at the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School of Spetses on the Peloponnesian island of Spetses.
9.
John Fowles wrote poems that he later published, and became close to his fellow expatriates.
10.
John Fowles became stepfather to Elizabeth's daughter from her first marriage, Anna.
11.
In late 1960, though he had already drafted The Magus, John Fowles began working on The Collector.
12.
John Fowles finished his first draft of The Collector in a month, but spent more than a year making revisions before showing it to his agent.
13.
The success of The Collector meant that John Fowles could stop teaching and devote himself full-time to a literary career.
14.
In 1965 John Fowles left London, moving to Underhill, a farm on the fringes of Lyme Regis, Dorset.
15.
The isolated farm house became the model for The Dairy in the book John Fowles was writing: The French Lieutenant's Woman.
16.
In 2008 John Fowles was named by The Times newspaper of the UK as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
17.
John Fowles composed a number of poems and short stories throughout his life, most of which were lost or destroyed.
18.
John Fowles served as the curator of the Lyme Regis Museum from 1979 to 1988, retiring from the museum after having a mild stroke.
19.
John Fowles was occasionally involved in local politics, writing letters to The Times advocating preservation.
20.
John Fowles's death affected him severely, and he did not write for a year.
21.
The correspondence started in 1990, when John Fowles was aged 65.