Fowles, John Robert (1926–2005)

English writer. His novels, often concerned with illusion and reality and with the creative process, include The Collector (1963), The Magus (1965), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) (filmed in 1981), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), and A Maggot (1985). He also wrote two collections of essays – The Aristos (1965) and Wormholes (1998) – and Poems (1973).

Fowles was born in Essex and educated at New College, Oxford. His first novel, The Collector, describes the strange relationship between a psychotic young man and the woman he loves and imprisons. The Magus attempted to develop a new programme for modern fiction, and created an elaborate and tangled web of bizarre incidents involving a young Englishman teaching on a Greek island; (a revised version was published in 1977.) The French Lieutenant's Woman is a clever semi-historical narrative mystery set largely in Lyme Regis, a ‘modern’ Victorian novel which uses the story of a passionate young woman to question both modern and 19th-century morals and ideas about fiction. His later work, including The Ebony Tower (1974), is technically more innovative. In addition to The Aristos and Wormholes, Fowles wrote a variety of non-fiction pieces including many essays, reviews, and forewords/afterwords to other writers' novels, and also wrote the text for several photographic compilations, including Shipwreck (1975), Islands (1978), and The Tree (1979).