John Fowles Best-Selling Author of the Magus and the French Lieutenant's Woman

Summary

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IT MIGHT be The French Lieutenant's Woman that ensures John Fowles, who died on Saturday aged 79, is enshrined forever in the literary hall of fame. But for many of his fans the world over, it's surely his 1966 novel, The Magus, that will linger. Both are extraordinary works, the former heralding the advent of the post- modern novel in English literature with its innovative double ending. But the latter, that Fowles himself disingenuously referred to as "a first novel - haphazard and naively instinctive", is what captured the mass audience that stayed with him throughout his writing life.

The popular appeal of his books always troubled Fowles, an early proponent of existentialism while at Oxford in the late 1940s. Left- wing and anti-Tory, he nevertheless had little faith in "the masses" and was regularly disappointed throughout his lifetime by readers' and critics' interpretations of his works. But he was one of the fewwriters in English of the past century to achieve both commercial and critical success, commanding advances from his publisher, Jonathan Cape, that were not seen "outside the Len Deighton or Ian Fleming class of writer", while simultaneously being compared to Tolstoy and Henry James.

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John Fowles Best-Selling Author of the Magus and the French Lieutenant's Woman

"The kindest act to the writer is remembering them, " wrote Fowles to a friend in 1980, defending a warts-and-all exposure of the private life of Thomas Hardy. But remembering comes in two packages, the public life and the private life, and...

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