John Robert Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town in Essex. He recalled the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional.
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.
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.
He served as a lieutenant in the Royal Marines for two years, but World War II ended before he could go into combat.
He taught English at the University of Poiters and then to Spetsai, a Greek island, where he taught at Anorgyrios College.
His first published work allowed him to retire with his wife and her daughter to Lyme Regis in Dorset, England.
Fowles had a keen interest in natural history, art, gardening, and local history.
In 1966, he envisioned a woman in black Victorian garb standing on a quay and staring out at the sea. The vision recurred, became an obsession, and led eventually to The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a Victorian novel in manner and mores, but contemporary and existential in viewpoint.
Not only was he an acclaimed fiction writer but he demonstrated expertise in his nonfiction writing, as well.
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