Category: Articles

John Fowles died on Saturday, November 5, 2005.   Read three different obituaries at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/2880967.stm http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/books/08fowles.html?_r=1 http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,16488,1636778,00.html And here is an interesting article: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1668489,00.html John Fowles–An Appreciation by Bob Goosmann John Fowles was a great writer and a very unique man.  In addition to producing two…

Thomas M. Wilson is an author who writes about literature and the environment, based in the port city of Fremantle in Western Australia.  He is also a nature photographer.  In 2006, Wilson published The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles (Rodopi Press), which examines the…

Hardbound volumes of John Fowles’ journals were published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Alfred Knopf in the U.S. in 2003-2006 (both are also available in paperback).  The first volume of Fowles’ journals begins in 1949, when he was a young man studying…

By Bob Goosmann Note: the following gives away key plot points in both the novel The Magus and the movie The Game. If you have not already read/seen them, proceed at your own risk (for the sake of simplicity, I’m assuming that everyone who reads…

by Bob Goosmann The following article originally appeared in the January 2004 issue of Firsts Magazine, the leading publication in the world for book collectors and dealers. This issue includes a checklist of Fowles first editions (with values and identifiers), along with more than 20…

John Robert Fowles was born March 31, 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town located about 40 miles from London in the county of Essex, England. He recalls the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of…

In 2016, BBC Radio 4 debuted a three-part adaptation of The Magus.  Faithfully adapted from John Fowles’ magnificent novel by acclaimed dramatist and screenwriter Adrian Hodges (My Week with Marilyn, Peter and Wendy, The Musketeers, Survivors, etc.), the radio drama stars Tom Burke as Nicholas,…

Eight years of planning and restoration came to fruition in 2015 with the re-opening of Belmont House, the Georgian dwelling in Lyme Regis, England that John Fowles called home for 37 years.  The Landmark Trust, a charity that rescues important buildings that might otherwise be…

The film version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman is now available in Region A (North America format) and Region B (Europe/Australia format) Blu-ray high-definition.  Even more exciting, it has been released by The Criterion Collection, which produces classic films in editions of the highest technical…

The Random House list of the best English-language novels of the 20th Century includes The Magus (listed at number 93). What makes the top-100 selection of The Magus all the more impressive is the fact that the list is heavily skewed toward novels from the…