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John Fowles is an internationally acclaimed novelist best known for The French Lieutenant's Woman, a romantic drama set in Lyme Regis, Dorset that was adapted and made into a successful film starring Meryl Streep.
His work reflects the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, among others.
The Collector (1963) was his literary debut, Its plot follows a lonely, psychotic young man who kidnaps a female art student in London and holds her captive in the cellar of his rural farmhouse. Divided in two sections, the novel contains both the perspective of the captor, Frederick, as well as that of Miranda, the captive. The portion of the novel told from Miranda's perspective is presented in epistolary form.
Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.
Fowles wrote the novel between November 1960 and March 1962. It was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated feature film of the same name in 1965 starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar.
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
After leaving Oxford University, Fowles taught English at a school on the Greek island of Spetses, a sojourn that inspired The Magus, an instant best-seller that was directly in tune with 1960s hippy anarchism and experimental philosophy.
It was made into a film, directed by Guy Green, and released in 1968. It starred Michael Caine as Nicholas Urfe, Anthony Quinn as Maurice Conchis, Anna Karina as Alison, Candice Bergen as Lily/Julie, and Julian Glover as Anton.
Later fictional works include The Ebony Tower, Daniel Martin, Mantissa and A Maggot.
I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
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