[This entry was updated by Thomas C. Foster (University of Michigan--—Flint) with the entry by Ellen Pifer (University of Delaware) in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 79-106.] A novelist who writes for a living,...

A novelist who writes for a living, says author John Fowles, is an altogether different creature from one whose art is his life. The latter, a "dynamic artist," seeks "to form new images and new methods of describing his world," while his less...

“I've always wanted to write,” declared John Fowles in a 1964 essay, “(in this order) poems, philosophy, and only then novels” (published in Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, 1998). Though he has established a reputation as...

John Fowles has consistently distanced himself from the middle-class English society that was his familial lot and a source of much resentment toward his father. Now living in a sort of self-imposed exile in the Dorset town of Lyme Regis, Fowles has...

John Fowles (born 1926) was an award-winning post-World War II novelist of major importance. While his works are reflective of literary tradition reaching back to Greek philosophy and Celtic romance, he was very much a contemporary existentialist, and...