Introduction
1 .bibliography
John Robert Fowles was born March
31, 1926 in Leigh on Sea, a small town located about 40 miles from London in
the county of Essex, England. He recalls the English suburban culture of the
1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional.
Of his childhood, Fowles says "I have tried to escape ever since."
Fowles attended Bedford School, a
large boarding school designed to prepare boys for university, from ages 13 to
18. After briefly attending the University of Edinburgh, Fowles began
compulsory military service in 1945 with training at Dart moor, where he spent
the next two years. World War II ended shortly after his training began so
Fowles never came near combat, and by1947 he had decided that the military life
was not for him.Fowles then spent four years at Oxford, where he discovered the
writings of the French existentialists. In particular he admired Albert Camus
and Jean Paul Sartre, whose writings corresponded with his own ideas about
conformity and the will of the individual. He received a degree in French in
1950 and began to consider a career as a writer. John Fowles died on November
5, 2005 after a long illness
John Fowles is a well known British author
(1926 – 2005) who has dedicated his life to the world of literature. His first
novel, The Collector published in 1963, has been reprinted several
times and has been translated into many languages, thus proving that Fowles’s
early works are still of interest to the public. In
late 1960 Fowles completed the first draft of The Collector in
just four weeks. He continued to revise it until the summer of 1962, when he
submitted it to a publisher it appeared in the spring of 1963 and was an
immediate best seller. The critical acclaim and commercial success of the book
allowed Fowles to devote all of his time to writing.