“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he's in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.”

English novelist

John Robert Fowles was an English novelist, active in the twentieth century, whose work is often placed between modernism and postmodernism. He is known for fiction shaped by philosophical concerns and by the influence of writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. His novels are associated with ideas of choice, freedom, and uncertainty, and with a style that looks back to modernist writing while also moving toward postmodern methods. He remains widely read for that blend of intellectual seriousness and narrative experimentation.