Fowles's success in the marketplace derives from his great skill as a storyteller. His fiction is rich in narrative suspense, romantic conflict, and erotic drama. Remarkably, he manages to sustain such effects at the same time that, as an experimental writer testing conventional assumptions about reality, he examines and parodies the traditional devices of storytelling. Less known to the reading public are his published works of poetry and philosophy. Along with his many essays, articles, reviews, and translations, they reflect their author's wide range of intellectual interests. Erudite in several fields of art and science, Fowles has written on subjects as diverse as medieval French literature, natural history, and biological evolution. He is one of the few writers today who commands the attention of both a mass audience and the literary scholar and critic.
Born 31 March 1926 in a small suburb of London, Fowles describes his hometown as "dominated by conformism—the pursuit of respectability." A fierce individualist, he attributes his dislike of groups, of "mankind en masse," to the oppressive social pressures of his childhood. Fowles learned, however, to cope with these pressures by developing, in his words, "a facility with masks." This ability "to pretend to be what I am not" helped him to win popularity as a student leader at Bedford School, a suburban London preparatory school he attended between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.
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