THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN’S MAN – NOVELIST JOHN FOWLES
by Richard B. Stolley
The pants are baggy and stained, with the fly at careless half-mast, and his sweater is as lumpy as a laundry bag. He works the local docks, maybe? Or drives a truck? Then study John Fowles’s head, that receptacle, as it happens, of one of the most original writing talents at work today. It is vaguely Olympian, big and powerful and thickly whiskered from ear to ear. Out of it sprang first, in 1963, the bizarre novel of a young maniac who progressed from trapping butterflies to human beings. It was called The Collector, and you never fell quite comfortable around lepidopterists again.
