303- ] English Literature - Neil Gaiman

303- ] English Literature

Neil Gaiman

Career

Journalism, early writings, and literary influences

Gaiman has mentioned several writers who have influenced his work, including Mary Shelley, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Michael Moorcock, Dave Sim, Alan Moore, Steve Ditko, Will Eisner, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, John Crowley, Lord Dunsany, G. K. Chesterton and Gene Wolfe. A lifetime fan of the Monty Python comedy troupe, he owned a copy of Monty Python's Big Red Book as a teenager. During a trip to France when he was 13, Gaiman became fascinated with the visually fantastic world in the stories of Métal Hurlant, even though he could not understand the words. When he was 19 or 20 years old, he contacted his favourite science fiction writer, R. A. Lafferty, requesting advice on becoming an author and including a Lafferty pastiche he had written. Lafferty sent Gaiman an encouraging and informative letter back, along with literary advice.

Gaiman has named Roger Zelazny as the author who influenced him the most. Gaiman claims that other authors such as Samuel R. Delany and Angela Carter "furnished the inside of my mind and set me to writing". Gaiman takes inspiration from the folk tales tradition, citing Otta F Swire's book on the legends of the Isle of Skye as his inspiration for The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains.

In the early 1980s, Gaiman pursued journalism, conducting interviews and writing book reviews, as a means to learn about the world and to make connections that he hoped would later assist him in getting published. He wrote and reviewed extensively for the British Fantasy Society. His first professional short story publication was "Featherquest", a fantasy story, in Imagine magazine in May 1984.

Gaiman frequented the Forbidden Planet comic store at its original location of Number 23, Denmark Street, central London (pictured).

While waiting for a train at London's Victoria Station in 1984, Gaiman noticed a copy of Swamp Thing by Alan Moore, and read it. Moore's approach to comics had such an impact on Gaiman that he later wrote "that was the final straw, what was left of my resistance crumbled. I proceeded to make regular and frequent visits to London's Forbidden Planet shop to buy comics".

In 1984, he wrote his first book, a biography of the band Duran Duran, and co-edited Ghastly Beyond Belief, a book of quotations, with Kim Newman. Although Gaiman thought he had done a terrible job, the book's first edition sold out very quickly. When he went to relinquish his rights to the book, he discovered the publisher had gone bankrupt. After this, he was offered a job by Penthouse. He refused the offer.

He also wrote interviews and articles for many British magazines, including Knave. During this, he sometimes wrote under pseudonyms, including Gerry Musgrave, Richard Grey, and "a couple of house names". Gaiman has said he ended his journalism career in 1987 because British newspapers regularly publish untruths as fact. In the late 1980s, he wrote Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion in what he calls a "classic English humour" style.

Following this, he wrote the opening of what became his collaboration with Terry Pratchett on the comic novel Good Omens, about the impending apocalypse.

Comics

Gaiman discusses The Sandman in 2014

See also: Neil Gaiman bibliography § Comics

After forming a friendship with Alan Moore, who taught him how to write comic scripts, Gaiman started writing comic books and picked up Miracleman after Moore finished his run on the series. He continued his professional relationship with Moore by contributing quotations for the supplemental materials in the Watchmen comic book series.

Gaiman and artist Mark Buckingham collaborated on several issues of the series before its publisher, Eclipse Comics, collapsed, leaving the series unfinished. His first published comic strips were four short Future Shocks for 2000 AD in 1986–87. He wrote three graphic novels with his favourite collaborator and long-time friend Dave McKean: Violent Cases, Signal to Noise, and The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch. Impressed with his work, DC Comics hired him in February 1987,[77] and he wrote the limited series Black Orchid. Karen Berger, who later became head of DC Comics's Vertigo, read Black Orchid and offered Gaiman a job: to re-write an old character, the Sandman, but to put his own spin on him.

The Sandman tells the tale of the ageless, anthropomorphic personification of Dream that is known by many names, including Morpheus. The series began in January 1989 and concluded in March 1996. The various artists who contributed to the series include Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Jill Thompson, Shawn McManus, Marc Hempel, and Michael Zulli, with lettering by Todd Klein, colours by Daniel Vozzo, and covers by Dave McKean. The series became one of DC's top selling titles, eclipsing even Batman and Superman. The 75 issues of the regular series, along with an illustrated prose text and a special containing seven short stories, have been collected into 12 volumes that remain in print.

In the eighth issue of The Sandman, Gaiman and artist Mike Dringenberg introduced Death, the older sister of Dream, who became as popular as the series' title character. The limited series Death: The High Cost of Living launched DC's Vertigo line in 1993.

Comics historian Les Daniels called Gaiman's work "astonishing" and noted that The Sandman was "a mixture of fantasy, horror, and ironic humor such as comic books had never seen before". DC Comics writer and executive Paul Levitz observed that "The Sandman became the first extraordinary success as a series of graphic novel collections, reaching out and converting new readers to the medium, particularly young women on college campuses, and making Gaiman himself into an iconic cultural figure."

Gaiman and Jamie Delano were to become co-writers of the Swamp Thing series following Rick Veitch. An editorial decision by DC to censor Veitch's final storyline caused both Gaiman and Delano to withdraw from the title.

Gaiman produced two stories for DC's Secret Origins series in 1989: a Poison Ivy[88] tale drawn by Mark Buckingham and a Riddlerstory illustrated by Bernie Mireault and Matt Wagner. A story that Gaiman originally wrote for Action Comics Weekly in 1989 was shelved due to editorial concerns but it was finally published in 2000 as Green Lantern/Superman: Legend of the Green Flame.

In 1990, Gaiman wrote The Books of Magic, a four-part mini-series that provided a tour of the mythological and magical parts of the DC Universe through a frame story about an English teenager who discovers that he is destined to be the world's greatest wizard. The miniseries was popular, and sired an ongoing series written by John Ney Rieber.

Gaiman's adaptation of Sweeney Todd, illustrated by Michael Zulli for Stephen R. Bissette's publication Taboo, was stopped when the anthology itself was discontinued.

In the mid-1990s, he also created a number of new characters and a setting that was to be featured in a title published by Tekno Comix. The concepts were then altered and split between three titles set in the same continuity: Lady Justice, Mr. Hero the Newmatic Man, and Teknophage, and tie-ins. Because the publisher aimed to expand their characters into other media such as television, Gaiman designed his concepts with potential TV and computer game adaptations in mind. Although his name appeared prominently as the creator of the characters, he was not involved in writing any of the above-mentioned books.

Gaiman wrote a semi-autobiographical story about a boy's fascination with Michael Moorcock's anti-hero Elric of Melniboné for Ed Kramer's anthology Tales of the White Wolf. In 1996, Gaiman and Kramer co-edited The Sandman: Book of Dreams. Nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the original fiction anthology featured stories and contributions by Tori Amos, Clive Barker, Gene Wolfe, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tad Williams, and others.

Asked why he likes comics more than other forms of storytelling, Gaiman said:

One of the joys of comics has always been the knowledge that it was, in many ways, untouched ground. It was virgin territory. When I was working on Sandman, I felt a lot of the time that I was actually picking up a machete and heading out into the jungle. I got to write in places and do things that nobody had ever done before. When I'm writing novels I'm painfully aware that I'm working in a medium that people have been writing absolutely jaw-droppingly brilliant things for, you know, three-four thousand years now. You know, you can go back. We have things like The Golden Ass. And you go, well, I don't know that I'm as good as that and that's two and a half thousand years old. But with comics I felt like – I can do stuff nobody has ever done. I can do stuff nobody has ever thought of. And I could and it was enormously fun.

Gaiman wrote two series for Marvel Comics. Marvel 1602 was an eight-issue limited series published from November 2003 to June 2004 with art by Andy Kubert and Richard Isanove. The Eternals was a seven-issue limited series drawn by John Romita Jr., which was published from August 2006 to March 2007.

In 2009, Gaiman wrote a two-part Batman story for DC Comics to follow Batman R.I.P. titled "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" a play-off of the classic Superman story "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" by Alan Moore. He contributed a twelve-part Metamorpho serial drawn by Mike Allred for Wednesday Comics, a weekly newspaper-style series. Gaiman and Paul Cornell co-wrote Action Comics #894 (December 2010), which featured an appearance by Death.[105] In October 2013, DC Comics released The Sandman: Overture with art by J. H. Williams III. Gaiman's Angela character was introduced into the Marvel Universe in the last issue of the Age of Ultron miniseries in 2013.

Gaiman oversaw The Sandman Universe, a line of comic books published by Vertigo. The four series — House of Whispers, Lucifer, The Books of Magic, and The Dreaming — were written by new creative teams. The line launched on 8 August 2018.

After teaming with Colleen Doran for a series of graphic novel adaptations based on his short stories "Troll Bridge", "Chivalry", and "Snow, Glass, Apples", Gaiman and the Terry Pratchett estate chose Doran to adapt Good Omens into graphic novel form, and to self publish the work via the Pratchett estate's Dunmanifestin label. It was financed on Kickstarter where it became a record-setter in less than a week as the top fan-supported and top-earning comics project in the history of the platform.

Novels

See also: Neil Gaiman bibliography § Novels and children's books

Neil Gaiman and Roz Kaveney discuss Why We Need Fantasy at the British Library on 20 November 2023.

Gaiman in 2009

In a collaboration with author Terry Pratchett, best known for his series of Discworld novels, Gaiman's first novel Good Omens was published in 1990. In 2011, Pratchett said that while the entire novel was a collaborative effort and most of the ideas could be credited to both of them, Pratchett did a larger portion of writing and editing if for no other reason than Gaiman's scheduled involvement with Sandman.

The 1996 novelisation of Gaiman's teleplay for the BBC mini-series Neverwhere was his first solo novel. The novel was released in tandem with the television series, though it presents some notable differences from the television series. Gaiman has since revised the novel twice, the first time for an American audience unfamiliar with the London Underground, the second time because he felt unsatisfied with the originals.

In 1999, the first printings of his fantasy novel Stardust were released. The novel has been released both as a standard novel and in an illustrated text edition. This novel was highly influenced by Victorian fairytales and culture. American Gods became one of Gaiman's best-selling and multi-award-winning novels upon its release in 2001. A special 10th Anniversary edition was released, with the "author's preferred text" 12,000 words longer than the original mass-market editions. Gaiman has not written a direct sequel to American Gods but he has revisited the characters. A glimpse at Shadow's travels in Europe is found in a short story which finds him in Scotland, applying the same concepts developed in American Gods to the story of Beowulf. The 2005 novel Anansi Boys deals with Anansi ('Mr. Nancy'), tracing the relationship of his two sons, one semi-divine and the other an unassuming bookkeeper, as they explore their common heritage. It debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list.

In 2002, Gaiman entered the world of children's books with the dark fairy tale Coraline. In 2008 he released a young adult novel, The Graveyard Book. It follows the adventures of a boy named Bod after his family is murdered and he is left to be brought up by a graveyard. It is heavily influenced by Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Literary critic Danel Olson defended it as one of the first canonical novels of 21st century Gothic literature. As of late January 2009, it had been on The New York Times Bestseller children's list for fifteen weeks.

In 2013, The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards. The novel follows an unnamed man who returns to his hometown for a funeral and remembers events that began forty years earlier. Themes include the search for self-identity and the "disconnect between childhood and adulthood". It was later adapted into a critically acclaimed stage play at the Royal National Theatre in London.

In September 2016, Neil Gaiman announced that he had been working for some years on retellings of Norse mythology. Norse Mythology was released in February 2017.

Several of his novels have been published as paperbacks with retro covers by artist Robert McGinnis.

Film and screenwriting

See also: Neil Gaiman bibliography § Film

Gaiman wrote the 1996 BBC dark fantasy television series Neverwhere. He co-wrote the screenplay for the movie MirrorMask with his old friend Dave McKean for McKean to direct. In addition, he wrote the localised English language script for the anime movie Princess Mononoke, based on a translation of the Japanese script.

After his disappointment with the production limitations of Neverwhere, Gaiman asked his agent to pull him out of an (unnamed) UK television series that was to begin production immediately afterwards. "I didn't want to do it unless I had more control than you get as a writer: in fantasy, the tone of voice, the look and feel, the way something is shot and edited is vital, and I wanted to be in charge of that."

He co-wrote the script for Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf with Roger Avary, a collaboration that has proved productive for both writers. Gaiman has expressed interest in collaborating on a film adaptation of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Gaiman on a panel about the Good Omens TV series at New York Comic Con in 2018

He was the only person other than J. Michael Straczynski to write a Babylon 5 script in the series' last three seasons, contributing to the season five episode "Day of the Dead". The series also features a recurring alien race called the Gaim, who resemble the character of Dream and are named after Gaiman.

Gaiman has also written at least three drafts of a screenplay adaptation of Nicholson Baker's novel The Fermata for director Robert Zemeckis, although the project was stalled while Zemeckis made The Polar Express and the Gaiman-Roger Avary-penned Beowulf film.

Neil Gaiman was featured in the History Channel documentary Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked.

Several of Gaiman's original works have been optioned or greenlighted for film adaptation, most notably Stardust, which premiered in August 2007 and stars Charlie Cox, Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Claire Danes and Mark Strong, directed by Matthew Vaughn. A stop-motion version of Coraline was released on 6 February 2009, directed by Henry Selick and starring the voices of Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher

In 2007, Gaiman announced that after ten years in development, the feature film of Death: The High Cost of Living would finally begin production with a screenplay by Gaiman that he would direct for Warner Independent. Gaiman said that he agreed to direct the film "with the carrot dangled in front of me that I could direct it. And we'll see if that happens, and if I'm a good director or not."[131] Don Murphy and Susan Montford were named as producers, and Guillermo del Toro was named as the film's executive producer. By 2010, it had been reported that the film was no longer in production. Seeing Ear Theatre performed two of Gaiman's audio theatre plays, "Snow, Glass, Apples", Gaiman's retelling of Snow White, and "Murder Mysteries", a story of heaven before the Fall in which the first crime is committed. Both audio plays were published in the collection Smoke and Mirrors in 1998.

At Guillermo del Toro's request, he rewrote the opening of Hellboy II: The Golden Army to make it look more like a fairy tale.

Gaiman's 2009 Newbery Medal winning book The Graveyard Book will be made into a movie, with Ron Howard as the director.

Gaiman wrote an episode of the long-running BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, broadcast in 2011 during Matt Smith's second series as the Doctor. Shooting began in August 2010 for this episode, the original title of which was "The House of Nothing" but which was eventually transmitted as "The Doctor's Wife". The episode won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). Gaiman made his return to Doctor Who with an episode titled "Nightmare in Silver", broadcast on 11 May 2013. Gaiman returned to the Whoniverse in 2020 for the web series Doctor Who: Lockdown; he wrote the mini-episode "Rory's Story" which saw Arthur Darvill reprise his role of Rory Williams. Also in 2011, it was announced that Gaiman would be writing the script to a new film version of Journey to the West. Gaiman appeared as himself on The Simpsons episode "The Book Job", which was broadcast on 20 November 2011.

In 2015, Starz greenlighted a series adaptation of Gaiman's novel American Gods. Bryan Fuller and Michael Green wrote and were showrunners for the series. Gaiman received a Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form Hugo Award in 2020 for the TV miniseries adaptation of Good Omens, for which he wrote the screenplay. He voiced Gef in the black comedy film Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose, one of the film's titular characters, in 2023.

Radio

A six-part radio play of Neverwhere was broadcast in March 2013, adapted by Dirk Maggs for BBC Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra. The performance featured James McAvoy as Richard, Natalie Dormer, Benedict Cumberbatch, Christopher Lee, Bernard Cribbens, and Johnny Vegas.

In September 2014, Gaiman and Terry Pratchett joined forces with BBC Radio 4 to make the first-ever dramatisation of their co-penned novel Good Omens, which was broadcast in December in five half-hour episodes and culminated in an hour-long final apocalyptic showdown. In 2021, Gaiman was cast as Duke Aubrey in an adaptation of Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, a novel Gaiman had previously proclaimed one of his favourites (and to which he had contributed a foreword for an edition by Cold Spring Press), for BBC Radio 4.

Public performances

Gaiman frequently performs public readings from his stories and poetry, and has toured with his wife, musician Amanda Palmer. In some of these performances he has also sung songs, in "a novelist's version of singing", despite having "no kind of singing voice".

In 2015, Gaiman delivered a 100-minute lecture for the Long Now Foundation entitled How Stories Last about the nature of storytelling and how stories persist in human culture. In April 2018, Gaiman made a guest appearance on the television show The Big Bang Theory, and his tweet about the show's fictional comic book store became the central theme of the episode "The Comet Polarization".

Intellectual property disputes

In 1993, Gaiman was contracted by Todd McFarlane to write a single issue of Spawn, for Image Comics, which McFarlane had recently co-founded. McFarlane was promoting his new title by having guest authors Gaiman, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and Dave Sim each write a single issue.

In issue No. 9 of the series, Gaiman introduced the characters Angela, Cogliostro, and Medieval Spawn. Prior to this issue, Spawn was an assassin who worked for the government and came back as a reluctant agent of Hell but had no real direction in his actions. In Angela, a cruel and malicious angel, Gaiman introduced a character who threatened Spawn's existence, as well as providing a moral opposite. Cogliostro was introduced as a mentor character for exposition and instruction, providing guidance. Medieval Spawn introduced a history and precedent that not all Spawns were self-serving or evil, giving additional character development to Malebolgia, the demon that creates Hellspawn.

As intended, all three characters were used repeatedly throughout the next decade by Todd McFarlane within the wider Spawn universe. In papers filed by Gaiman in early 2002, however, he claimed that the characters were jointly owned by their scripter (himself) and artist (McFarlane), not merely by McFarlane in his role as the creator of the series. Disagreement over who owned the rights to a character was the primary motivation for McFarlane and other artists to form Image Comics (although that argument related more towards disagreements between writers and artists as character creators). As McFarlane used the characters without Gaiman's permission or royalty payments, Gaiman believed his copyrighted work was being infringed upon, which violated their original oral agreement. McFarlane initially agreed that Gaiman had not signed away any rights to the characters, and negotiated with Gaiman to effectively "swap" McFarlane's interest in the character Marvelman. McFarlane had purchased an interest in the character when Eclipse Comics was liquidated while Gaiman was interested in being able to continue his aborted run of the Marvelman title. McFarlane later changed his initial position, claiming that Gaiman's work had only been work-for-hire and that McFarlane owned all of Gaiman's creations entirely. The presiding judge, however, ruled against their agreement being work for hire, based in large part on the legal requirement that "copyright assignments must be in writing."

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court ruling in February 2004 granting joint ownership of the characters to Gaiman and McFarlane. On the specific issue of Cogliostro, presiding Judge John C. Shabaz proclaimed, "The expressive work that is the comic-book character Count Nicholas Cogliostro was the joint work of Gaiman and McFarlane—their contributions strike us as quite equal—and both are entitled to ownership of the copyright". Similar analysis led to similar results for the other two characters, Angela and Medieval Spawn.

This legal battle was brought by Gaiman and the specifically formed Marvels and Miracles, LLC, which Gaiman had previously created to help sort out the legal rights surrounding Marvelman. Gaiman had written Marvel 1602 in 2003 to help fund this project and all of Gaiman's profits for the original issues of the series were donated to Marvels and Miracles. The rights to Marvelman were subsequently purchased, from original creator Mick Anglo, by Marvel Comics in 2009.

Gaiman returned to court again over the Spawn characters Dark Ages Spawn, Domina, and Tiffany, claiming that they were "derivative of the three he co-created with McFarlane." The judge ruled that Gaiman was right in these claims as well and gave McFarlane until the beginning of September 2010 to settle the matter.

Sexual assault and misconduct allegations

In July and August 2024, five women accused Gaiman of sexual assault and abuse. All five were interviewed on the Tortoise Media podcast Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman. One, using the pseudonym "Claire", was also interviewed by The New York Times. Claire described non-consensual kissing and groping by Gaiman after meeting him at a book tour event, as well as a $60,000 payment from Gaiman to her in August 2022. A woman identified as "K", who also first met Gaiman at a book signing, said that during their relationship he subjected her to painful sex that she "neither wanted nor enjoyed".

Scarlett Pavlovich, a former nanny for Gaiman and Palmer's child, alleges that Gaiman sexually assaulted her within hours of their first meeting in February 2022. Pavlovich recalled that he said, "Amanda told me I couldn't have you" after the assault; according to one of Palmer's friends, Palmer had previously told Gaiman, "You could really hurt this person and break her; keep your hands off of her". Pavlovich said that Gaiman had anal sex with her in the presence of his son.

Caroline Wallner, a former tenant of Gaiman's, alleges that he demanded sexual favours in exchange for being allowed to continue living on his property Wallner says that on one occasion, Gaiman grabbed her hand and placed it on his penis while his young son was asleep in the same bed. In 2021, Wallner, her ex-husband, and Gaiman signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), and Gaiman paid Wallner $275,000. In early 2025, Gaiman and Wallner both requested arbitration, the dispute resolution method mandated by the NDA, each accusing the other of violating the agreement.

The writer Julia Hobsbawm accused Gaiman of "an aggressive, unwanted pass" and described how Gaiman pushed her onto a sofa and French kissed her in 1986.

In September 2024, Disney halted production on the film adaptation of The Graveyard Book due to a variety of factors, including the sexual assault allegations against Gaiman. That same month, production on season three of Good Omens was put on hold; Gaiman ultimately left the project in October.

In January 2025 New York magazine published a cover story detailing the allegations against Gaiman. This article, which was published online on Vulture, included interviews with four of the women who had previously spoken to Tortoise Media, as well as four more women. Later the same month, Dark Horse Comics announced that they would cut ties with Gaiman over the allegations, including cancelling his ongoing comic adaptation of Anansi Boys. Gaiman was also dropped as a client by his agent Casarotto Ramsay.

In February 2025, Pavlovich filed three federal lawsuits in the US that alleged human trafficking under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, alongside formal allegations of sexual assault and coercion. One named Gaiman and Palmer as co-defendants and two were against Palmer alone, seeking at least US$7 million in damages. In his response to the lawsuit, Gaiman accused Pavlovich of lying, presenting text messages in which she appeared to confirm that no sexual abuse had taken place, and claimed that police in New Zealand had already investigated her claims and found them to be false. Gaiman also claimed that the American court lacked jurisdiction to hear the case—because the alleged assaults happened in New Zealand—and asked for the case to be dismissed. A Wisconsin federal judge granted this request without ruling on the facts of the case, and Pavlovich appealed the dismissal. Pavlovich's remaining US lawsuits against Gaiman were dismissed in October 2025 and February 2026, noting the proper location to pursue any potential case is New Zealand.

Gaiman has denied engaging in non-consensual sex, and dismissed Hobsbawm's allegations as misreading the situation. Gaiman's representatives claim that Wallner initiated their sexual encounters and that none of these occurred in the presence of Gaiman's child. In a blog post responding to coverage of the allegations against him, Gaiman said there were "moments I half-recognise and moments I don't". He denies engaging in any non-consensual sexual activity, but said he could have "done so much better" and was "trying to do the work needed".  

302- ] English Literature - Neil Gaiman

302- ] English Literature

Neil Gaiman

Personal life

Early life and education

Neil Richard Gaiman was born on 10 November 1960 in Portchester, Hampshire. Gaiman's family is of Polish-Jewish and other Ashkenazi origins. His great-grandfather emigrated to England from Antwerp before 1914and his grandfather settled in Portsmouth and established a chain of grocery stores, changing the family name from Chaiman to Gaiman His father, David Bernard Gaiman, worked in the same chain of stores; his mother, Sheila Gaiman (née Goldman), was a pharmacist. Neil has two younger sisters, Claire and Lizzy.

The Gaimans moved in 1965 to the West Sussex town of East Grinstead, where his parents studied Dianetics at the Scientology centre in the town; one of Gaiman's sisters works for the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles. His other sister, Lizzy Calcioli, has said, "Most of our social activities were involved with Scientology or our Jewish family. It would get very confusing when people would ask my religion as a kid. I'd say, 'I'm a Jewish Scientologist.'" Gaiman says that he is not a Scientologist, and that like Judaism, Scientology is his family's religion. About his personal views, Gaiman has stated, "I think we can say that God exists in the DC Universe. I would not stand up and beat the drum for the existence of God in this universe. I don't know, I think there's probably a 50/50 chance. It doesn't really matter to me."

Gaiman was able to read at the age of four. He said, "I was a reader. I loved reading. Reading things gave me pleasure. I was very good at most subjects in school, not because I had any particular aptitude in them, but because normally on the first day of school, they'd hand out schoolbooks, and I'd read them—which would mean that I'd know what was coming up because I'd read it." When he was about 10 years old, he read his way through the works of Dennis Wheatley; The Ka of Gifford Hillary and The Haunting of Toby Jugg made a special impact on him.

Another work that made a particular impression was J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which he got from his school library. Although they only had the first two of the novel's three volumes, Gaiman consistently checked them out and read them. He later won the school English prize and the school reading prize, enabling him to finally acquire the third volume. For his seventh birthday, Gaiman received C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. He later recalled that "I admired his use of parenthetical statements to the reader, where he would just talk to you ... I'd think, 'Oh, my gosh, that is so cool! I want to do that! When I become an author, I want to be able to do things in parentheses.' I liked the power of putting things in brackets." Narnia also introduced him to literary awards, specifically the Carnegie Medal, won by the concluding volume in 1956. When Gaiman won the 2010 Medal himself, he said "it had to be the most important literary award there ever was" and "if you can make yourself aged seven happy, you're really doing well – it's like writing a letter to yourself aged seven." Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was another childhood favourite, and "a favourite forever. Alice was default reading to the point where I knew it by heart." He also enjoyed Batman comics.

Gaiman attended Ardingly College in Ardingly, West Sussex

Gaiman was educated at several Church of England schools, including Fonthill School in East Grinstead, Ardingly College (1970–1974), and Whitgift School in Croydon (1974–1977). His father's position as a public relations official of the Church of Scientology was the cause of the seven-year-old Gaiman being forced to withdraw from Fonthill School and return to the school which he had previously attended. He lived in East Grinstead for many years, from 1965 to 1980 and again from 1984 to 1987.

In the 1970s, he spent three years as an auditor for the Church of Scientology, an unusually high-ranking position given his age. He also sang in a punk rock band Ex Execs, formerly called Chaos.

He met his first wife, Mary McGrath, while she was studying Scientology and living in a house in East Grinstead that was owned by his father. The couple were married in 1985 after having their first child.

Adult life

Gaiman and wife Amanda Palmer in Vienna, 2011

Gaiman moved near Menomonie, Wisconsin, in 1992 to be closer to the family of his then-wife, Mary McGrath, with whom he has three children. Gaiman has also lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was close friends with fellow author Terry Pratchett until the latter's death in 2015. Gaiman met Amanda Palmer in 2008, and the two entered a relationship in 2009, marrying in 2011. They have one son together. The two had an open marriage, and encouraged one another to have other partners, including fans of their work.

Gaiman, Palmer and their son moved to New Zealand in March 2020. Weeks later, their marriage collapsed and Gaiman left the country, travelling from New Zealand to his holiday home on the Isle of Skye, which broke COVID-19 lockdown rules. Ross, Skye and Lochaber MP Ian Blackford described Gaiman's behaviour as unacceptable and dangerous. Gaiman published an apology on his website, saying he had endangered the local community. After Gaiman's departure, Palmer announced on Patreon that she and Gaiman had separated. Gaiman stated the split was "my fault, I'm afraid", and requested privacy. The couple later released a joint statement clarifying that they were not getting divorced, reconciled in 2021, but confirmed they would divorce in a November 2022 joint statement. As of January 2025, in the fifth year of proceedings, negotiations had become "ugly", with Palmer moving in with her parents due to financial difficulties.

Blog and social media

In February 2001, when Gaiman had completed writing American Gods, his publishers set up a promotional website featuring a weblog in which Gaiman described the day-to-day process of revising, publishing, and promoting the novel. After the novel was published, the website evolved into a more general Official Neil Gaiman Website. Gaiman generally posts to the blog describing the day-to-day process of being Neil Gaiman and writing, revising, publishing, or promoting whatever the current project is. He also posts reader emails and answers questions, which gives him unusually direct and immediate interaction with fans. One of his answers on why he writes the blog is "because writing is, like death, a lonely business." The original American Gods blog was extracted for publication in the NESFA Press collection of Gaiman miscellany, Adventures in the Dream Trade. To celebrate the seventh anniversary of the blog, the novel American Gods was provided free of charge online for a month.

Gaiman joined Twitter in 2008. In 2013, Gaiman was named by IGN as one of "The Best Tweeters in Comics", describing his posts as "sublime".

Other personal relationships

Gaiman is godfather to Tori Amos's daughter Tash, and wrote a poem called "Blueberry Girl" for Tori and Tash. The poem was adapted into a book by illustrator Charles Vess. Gaiman read the poem aloud to an audience at the Sundance Kabuki Theater in San Francisco on 5 October 2008 during his book reading tour for The Graveyard Book. It was published in March 2009 with the title Blueberry Girl.

Advocacy

In 2016, Gaiman, along with several other celebrities, appeared in the video "What They Took With Them", from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, to help raise awareness of the issue of global refugees.

Gaiman is a supporter of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and has served on its board of directors. In 2013, Gaiman was named co-chair of the organization's newly formed advisory board.

In 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gaiman supported Ukraine by announcing on Twitter that he does not want to renew contracts with Russian publishers. Gaiman also encouraged donating to Ukrainian refugees.

In 2023, Gaiman signed an open letter addressed to Russian president Vladimir Putin, alongside over 100 other public figures, calling for the release of Russian prisoner Alexei Navalny.

301 - ] English Literature - Neil Gaiman

301- ] English Literature

Neil Gaiman 

Born  Neil Richard Gaiman

10 November 1960 (age 65)

Portchester, Hampshire, England

Occupation

Authorcomic book writerscreenwritervoice actor

Genre         

Fantasyhorrorscience fictiondark fantasycomedy

Years active          1984–present

Notable works      The Sandman, Neverwhere, American Gods, Stardust, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, Good Omens, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Spouses      

Mary McGrath

​​(m. 1985; div. 2007)​

Amanda Palmer

​​(m. 2011; sep. 2022)​

Children     4

Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman (/ˈɡeɪmən/; born Neil Richard Gaiman; 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, audio theatre, and screenplays. His works include the comic series The Sandman (1989–1996) and the novels Good Omens (1990), Stardust (1999), American Gods (2001), Coraline (2002), Anansi Boys (2005), The Graveyard Book (2008) and The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013). He co-created the TV adaptations of Good Omens and The Sandman.

Gaiman's awards include Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards and Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book. The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards, and it was adapted into an acclaimed stage play at the Royal National Theatre in London.

Beginning in 2024, news outlets published sexual assault accusations against Gaiman by numerous women. This affected or halted production on several adaptations of his work. One accuser sued Gaiman and his estranged wife Amanda Palmer for rape and human trafficking. Gaiman has denied these allegations. 

300-] English Literature - John Fowles

300-] English Literature

John Fowles

John Fowles, Alone But Not Lonely

By RICHARD BOSTON

John Fowles has always hankered for exile. His chief discovery of the last five years is that "if you're into English and you want to go into exile then you live in England. There's nowhere you can feel more alienated from your fellow human beings. If you go to France or Greece you're not really an exile because you're living among people you might admire. If I'd been born in 1906 instead of 1926 I'd be living abroad, because I can't stand the English way of life. I'd be leading Lawrence Durrell's or D. H. Lawrence's kind of life."

Fowles taste for exile comes not only from his feelings about English middle-class society, but also from a positive taste for isolation and loneliness. "It's a terrible confession to make. Loneliness is meant to make you unhappy. It's never done so to me." He has no contact at all with the social life of the community around him and plays no part in the life of the London-centered literary world, which he despises.

The world of the imagination to which he is always drifting is obviously very important to him. He says that his mind, which he talks about as objectively as if it was someone else's, is deficient in all sorts of ways, but that imaginatively it is very rich. He enjoys his imagination and for this reason he doesn't mind sleeping nights: "I can always lie in the darkness and let my imagination run riot." Indeed most of his creative work seems to be done in the state between sleeping and waking. In that sort of condition, he says, he needs very little material to get a story going: It might be the face of an actress seen on television, or a street scene in a print he's been looking at in the daytime. Then he can write the whole story in 40 seconds in his mind.

"The period when I'm going to sleep and the dream is taking over I usually use for working on stuff I'm already writing about. I sort of film scenes." His richest creative period, however, is waking up. His new novel, "The French Lieutenant's Woman," started in this way. "I saw this woman standing on the end of a quay looking out to sea. It was one of these hypno. . .hypno. . .waking up things." He fetches a dictionary to find the word. "Hypnogogic? No, that's just before falling asleep. Here we are. Hypnopompic: between sleeping and waking. Hypnopompic." He repeats the word several times, obviously liking it.

The hypnopompic woman on the end of the quay was wearing Victorian clothes, and this connected up with an interest he had long had in the Victorian period. He dropped the novel he was working on at the time and wrote the book all in one go, the only time he has written a book in this way. His usual procedure is to write a first draft very quickly. (The first draft of "The Collector," for example, was written in under a month.) Then he drops it for a long time. The second stage, when he returns to the book to revise and write, usually takes about six or nine months.

This way of writing explains why "The Collector," his first published book, was the eighth or ninth (he's not exactly sure of the number) to be written. And the first draft of "The Magus," his third book to be published, was written some 12 years or so earlier.

Most of his first drafts are not publishable, he says. "I suppose I can write first drafts at exceptional speeds. I can write a novel in a fortnight or three weeks. I have the strength and the freedom to do so. I've collected a lot of these very rapid first-draft manuscripts, which I tend to hang on to. I did with 'The Magus.' One or two others I've thrown away. But I have four or five now, which gradually I'll pick up again."

He talks about his own work very frankly. He published "The Collector" first (1963) because he felt that it came off, whereas all his other books had been too diffuse: "They were too large and I hadn't the technique." Next came "The Aristos" (1965), a collection of philosophical apothegms written over a space of several years. Most readers of "The Aristos" seem to have felt that it did not work, an opinion Fowles himself apparently shares. "A lot of it was completely misfired flamboyance. And the pensÈe form is very antipathetic to the English palate." But though he considers the book to have been a mistake he says it is a mistake he would go on making. "I wouldn't withdraw it even if I was given the chance. I stick by what I said in that book. I think some of it was even mildly prophetic."

He also agrees that his second novel to be published, "The Magus" (1966), was not very good. He even goes so far as to call it a failure. "I hadn't the technique. The form is inadequate for the content." What was he trying to do in "The Magus?" "I've given many answers to that question, which perhaps shows a certain confusion. . .I was trying to tell a fable about the relationship between man and his conception of God." At the same time, he says, he was trying to do an adventure story on the lines of Alain Fournier's "Le Grand Meaulnes," a book that has always haunted him, and the one which he thinks is really the influence behind "The Magus."

But he is against questions along such lines as what he is trying to do in his books. "Books aren't planned, they write themselves." He agrees, however, that "The Collector" was consciously given a deliberate shape and meaning and is to that extent a programmatic novel--at least by comparison with his other books. He calls "The Collector" an island which he deliberately went to, whereas "The Magus" was an island to which he drifted. Though "The Collector" was 50 times easier to write, he says, "The Magus" was much nicer.

In "The French Lieutenant's Woman" he doesn't think he was trying to say anything much, but Prokofiev's "Classical Symphony" was drifting about in his mind all the time he was writing the book, and he suggests that perhaps the novel is similar to the music in its half-loving, half-ironic treatment of the material. Beyond that, the aim of the book is presumably that of any novel: the art of novel writing, he says in rather a nice phrase, is that of "being able to caress people's imaginations." Later he said that it was "being able to put your finger on the archetypal things in people's minds." It is a good description of what makes his novels, at their best, so compulsively readable.

Fowles didn't expect "The Collector" to be a success--which of course it was. Before the book was even published, he had earned several thousand pounds from the sale of paperback, translation and film rights, and the book has now been selling very well in several countries for six years. On the other hand, he thought "The Magus" would be more successful than it was. He didn't expect "The French Lieutenant's Woman" to do well either critically or in sales; in fact the reviews in Britain were more favorable than those for any of his other books. It has also sold well--in so far as any hardback edition of a novel sells well in Britain. He feels that the novel is in terrible condition commercially in Britain and that "in Britain there's a kind of coldness toward novelists that makes one very indifferent to being published here. There's no contact with an English audience." This may of course be simply because his books are less popular and are much less highly rated in Britain than in the United States (though I would guess that the publication of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" may cause Fowles to be taken more seriously by his compatriots). "I don't know why the Americans like my books so much," he says reflectively.

Like many English writers of this century (and perhaps especially of his generation) Fowles has had consciously to revolt against his middle-class background. Up to the age of 20, he says, he was a very successful conformer. He enjoyed his public school, where he was made a prefect very young and became captain of cricket and head boy and had really rather a comfortable life. "Being head boy was a weird experience. You had total power over 800 other boys; you were totally responsible for discipline and punishment. I spent my 18th year holding court really. I'd have 20 boys before me every morning, who you were both prosecutor and judge of. . .and executioner, of course. I suppose I used to beat on average three or four boys a day. . ." He pauses for nearly half a minute, then adds, "Very evil, I think. Terrible system."

Near the end of World War II he left school and went into the Marines, which he disliked intensely. "I reckon I was--I probably still am--about five or six years behind the average writer, who is usually aware by around the age of 16 that there is something literary about him and that he's going to try and be a writer. But this didn't really happen to me until I was 22 or 23. I was a nonintellectual at school."

He did not have much money at this time and says that until he was 35 he often couldn't even afford to buy a pack of cigarettes, though he feels that not having money mattered much less in the 1950's than it would today. His finances changed drastically with the publication of "The Collector."

He now lives in Dorset in a beautiful house in Lyme Regis. The house faces due south and looks down over a large garden, the surrounding trees of which not only make it a suntrap but also mean that there is not a single other house in sight. The garden slopes down steeply, and below is the sea and a small harbor with a few tiny fishing vessels that from this height look like toys. This is the quay on which Fowles hypnopompically saw the figure who originated "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and who is described in the first pages of the book. In fact he moved to this house only after he had had the dream and written the book.

There are other reminders of the novel in the house. The tests, for example. These are the petrified sea-urchins found at Lyme Regis which the Darwinian protagonist of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" collects. John Fowles has several of them. He gave up smoking recently, having been a heavy smoker all his adult life. As he talks, he picks up and plays with the tests as a cigarette-substitute. "This is what giving up smoking does to you," he says, helping himself to a second piece of chocolate cake. "You go back to your Billy Bunter self. I haven't enjoyed things like chocolate cake so much for years."

"I'm very rich," he says. "I'm rich in a minor financial way, rich enough never to buy new clothes, never to want to go abroad, rich enough not to like spending money any more. I'm also rich in having many interests. I always have a backlog of books to read, there's the garden, nature, walking. . ."

What he calls "this nature business" is difficult to talk about in modern times, he says, but clearly it is very important to him. The English writers and artists he feels closest to--"I don't consider them the greatest by any means, but I feel a kind of kinship with them"-- are those like John Clare, Richard Jefferies and Samuel Palmer, in whom observation of nature is of prime importance.

When he was a boy he used to be a great butterfly collector and hunter of animals. "I've completely rejected that now for many years. I loathe guns and people who collect living things. This is the only thing that really makes me angry nowadays, I'm afraid--the abuse of nature."

In spite of his harsh comments about England it is quite apparent that he loves England very much. The comments are aimed at the restrictions of middle-class life, restrictions from which he seems quite successfully to have freed himself. A few years ago he told everyone that he was going to leave England, but all the time he knew that he didn't really want to go. For one thing there is the "nature business," which Malta, or whatever other tax-haven he might have been driven to by Her Majesty's inspectors of taxes, could never have replaced.

Fowles's life is one of literally and metaphorically, cultivating his garden. He doesn't write regularly, but in bursts for very long hours. Then for a long time he dreams and drifts. He hates routine and considers himself to be as lucky as it is possible to be. He and his wife, he says, are the people of the year 2069: "Like us they'll be free of the responsibility of children and of making money and they'll have to find a creative outlet of some kind. You will have hundreds and hundreds of poets and painters and novelists who are not going to have an audience, but will have to find some justification in the activity itself." He himself doesn't particularly like publishing his books and feels that he doesn't need an audience to write for, and that if he was the only person left in the world he would still go on writing.

"I get much more pleasure from writing books than from having them published. I like the creation of another world. That is very beautiful and satisfying for me. As soon as a book leaves this room, this house, there's always a diminution of pleasure."

Mr. Boston is an English journalist and critic.

299- ] English Literature - John Fowles

299- ] English Literature

John Fowles

Born                                        31 March 1926

Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England

Died                                         5 November 2005 (aged 79)

Lyme Regis, Dorset, England

Occupation                             Writer, teacher

Alma mater                             University of Edinburgh

New College, Oxford

Period                                      1960–2005

Notable works                        The Collector

The Magus

The French Lieutenant's Woman

John Robert Fowles (/faʊlz/; 31 March 1926 – 5 November 2005) was an English novelist, critically positioned between modernism and postmodernism. His work was influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, among others.

After leaving Oxford University, Fowles taught English at a school on the Greek island of Spetses, a sojourn that inspired The Magus (1965), an instant best-seller that was directly in tune with 1960s "hippy" anarchism and experimental philosophy. This was followed by The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), a Victorian-era romance with a postmodern twist that was set in Lyme Regis, Dorset, where Fowles lived for much of his life. Later fictional works include The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), and A Maggot (1985).

Fowles's books have been translated into many languages, and several have been adapted as films.

Early life

Birth and family

Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, England, the only son and elder child (a sister, Hazel, was born fifteen years later)[1] of Robert John Fowles and Gladys May, née Richards. His father had trained as a lawyer—"clerking and reading in a barrister's chambers"[2]—but worked for the family business, tobacco importer Allen & Wright, as his father Reginald had been a partner in the company; at Reginald's death, Robert was obliged to run the firm as his brother had died in the Battle of Ypres and there were young dependent half-siblings to provide for from his father's second marriage. Gladys was daughter of John Richards, a draper, and his wife Elizabeth, who was in service. They came from Cornwall to London, where John became chief buyer for a department store, and gave their daughter a "comfortable upbringing in Chelsea", but they relocated to Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex on account of the healthier climate following the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. On returning from the First World War in bad health, having served for three years as an officer in the Honourable Artillery Company, Robert Fowles met his future wife at a Westcliff-on-Sea tennis club.

Education

During his childhood Fowles was attended[clarification needed] by his mother and his cousin Peggy Fowles, who was 18 years his senior. He attended Alleyn Court Preparatory School, where a maternal uncle and aunt were teachers.

In 1939, he won a place at Bedford School, where he remained a pupil until 1944. He became head boy and was an athletic standout: a member of the rugby football third team, the fives first team, and captain of the cricket team, for which he was a bowler.

After leaving Bedford School, Fowles enrolled in a Naval Short Course at the University of Edinburgh and was prepared to receive a commission in the Royal Marines. He completed his training on 8 May 1945 and was then assigned to Okehampton Camp, Devon, for two years.

After completing his military service in 1947, Fowles entered New College, Oxford, where he studied both French and German, although he stopped studying German and concentrated on French for his BA. Fowles was undergoing a political transformation. Upon leaving the marines, he wrote, "I ... began to hate what I was becoming in life—a British Establishment young hopeful. I decided instead to become a sort of anarchist."

It was also at Oxford that Fowles first considered life as a writer, particularly after reading existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. He has also commented that the ambience of Oxford at the time, where such existentialist notions of "authenticity" and "freedom" were pervasive, influenced him. Though Fowles did not identify as an existentialist, their writing was motivated from a feeling that the world was absurd, a feeling he shared.

Career

Teaching

Fowles spent his early adult life as a teacher. His first year after Oxford was spent at the University of Poitiers. At the end of the year, he received two offers: one from the French department at Winchester, the other "from a ratty school in Greece," Fowles said: "Of course, I went against all the dictates of common sense and took the Greek job."

In 1951, Fowles became an English master at the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School of Spetses on the Peloponnesian island of Spetses (also known as Spetsai). This opened a critical period in his life, as the island was where he met his future wife. Inspired by his experiences and feelings there, he used it as the setting of his novel The Magus (1966). Fowles was happy in Greece, especially outside the school. He wrote poems that he later published, and became close to his fellow expatriates. But during 1953, he and the other masters at the school were all dismissed for trying to institute reforms, and Fowles returned to England.

On the island of Spetses, Fowles had developed a relationship with Elizabeth Christy, née Whitton, then married to another teacher, Roy Christy. That marriage was already ending because of Fowles. Although they returned to England at the same time, they were no longer in each other's company. It was during this period that Fowles began drafting The Magus.

His separation from Elizabeth did not last long. On 2 April 1957, they were married. Fowles became stepfather to Elizabeth's daughter from her first marriage, Anna. For nearly ten years, he taught English as a foreign language to students from other countries at St. Godric's College, an all-girls establishment in Hampstead, London.

Literary career

In late 1960, though he had already drafted The Magus, Fowles began working on The Collector. He finished his first draft of The Collector in a month, but spent more than a year making revisions before showing it to his agent. Michael S. Howard, the publisher at Jonathan Cape, was enthusiastic about the manuscript. The book was published in 1963 and when the paperback rights were sold in the spring of that year, it was "probably the highest price that had hitherto been paid for a first novel," according to Howard. British reviewers found the novel to be an innovative thriller, and several American critics detected a serious promotion of existentialist thought.

The success of The Collector meant that Fowles could stop teaching and devote himself full-time to a literary career. Film rights to the book were optioned and it was adapted as a feature film of the same name in 1965.[12] Against the advice of his publisher, Fowles insisted that his second published book be The Aristos, a non-fiction collection of philosophy essays. Afterward, he set about collating all the drafts he had written of what would become his most studied work, The Magus.

In 1965 Fowles left London, moving to Underhill, a farm on the fringes of Lyme Regis, Dorset. The isolated farm house became the model for The Dairy in the book Fowles was writing: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). Finding the farm too remote, ("total solitude gets a bit monotonous," Fowles remarked), in 1968 he and his wife moved to Belmont, in Lyme Regis (Belmont was formerly owned by Eleanor Coade), which Fowles used as a setting for parts of The French Lieutenant's Woman. In this novel, Fowles created one of the most enigmatic female characters in literary history. His conception of femininity and myth of masculinity as developed in this text is psychoanalytically informed.

In the same year, he adapted The Magus for cinema, and the film was released in 1968. The film version of The Magus (1968) was generally considered awful; when Peter Sellers was asked whether he would make changes in his life if he had the opportunity to do it all over again, he jokingly replied, "I would do everything exactly the same except I wouldn't see The Magus."

The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) was released to critical and popular success. It was translated into more than ten languages, and established Fowles's international reputation. It was adapted as a feature film in 1981 with a screenplay by the noted British playwright (and later Nobel laureate) Harold Pinter, and starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons.

Fowles lived the rest of his life in Lyme Regis. His works The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), and A Maggot (1985) were all written from Belmont House. In 1980 he wrote a highly appreciative introduction to G. B. Edwards's The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (Hamish Hamilton, 1981), the fictional autobiography set in Guernsey: 'There may have been stranger literary events than the book you are about to read but I rather doubt it' (reprinted in his Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, ed. Jan Relf (Jonathan Cape, 1998), pp. 166–74.

Fowles composed a number of poems and short stories throughout his life, most of which were lost or destroyed. In December 1950 he wrote My Kingdom for a Corkscrew. For A Casebook (1955) was rejected by various magazines. In 1970 he wrote The Last Chapter.

In 2008 Fowles was named by The Times as one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.

Personal life

Fowles served as the curator of the Lyme Regis Museum from 1979 to 1988,[19] retiring from the museum after having a mild stroke. He was occasionally involved in local politics, writing letters to The Times advocating preservation. Despite this involvement, he was generally considered reclusive.

In 1990, his first wife Elizabeth died of cancer, only a week after she was diagnosed. Her death affected him severely, and he did not write for a year. In 1998, he was quoted in the New York Times Book Review as saying, "Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation."

In 1998, Fowles married his second wife, Sarah Smith. With Sarah by his side, he died of heart failure on 5 November 2005, aged 79, in Axminster Hospital, 5 miles (8.0 km) from Lyme Regis.

In 2008, Elena van Lieshout presented a series of 120 love letters and postcards for auction at Sotheby's. The correspondence started in 1990, when Fowles was aged 65. Elena, a young Welsh admirer and a student at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, contacted the reclusive author and they developed a sensitive, albeit unconsummated, relationship.

Controversy

Following Fowles's death in 2005, his unpublished diaries from 1965 to 1990 were revealed to contain racist and homophobic statements, with particular ire towards Jewish people. He described rare book dealer Rick Gekoski as "Too Jewish for English tastes ... bending to the way of the wind, or the business and money pressure", and wrote a consciously antisemitic poem about publishers Tom Maschler and Roger Straus.

List of works

(1963) The Collector

(1964) The Aristos, essays (ISBN 0-586-05377-8)

(1965) The Magus (revised 1977)

(1969) The French Lieutenant's Woman

(1973) Poems by John Fowles

(1974) The Ebony Tower

(1974) Shipwreck

(1977) Daniel Martin

(1978) Islands

(1979) The Tree

(1980) The Enigma of Stonehenge

(1982) A Short History of Lyme Regis

(1982) Mantissa

(1985) A Maggot

(1985) Land (with Fay Godwin)

(1990) Lyme Regis Camera

(1998) Wormholes - Essays and Occasional Writings

(2003) The Journals – Volume 1

(2006) The Journals – Volume 2