"John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds," Eileen Warburton provides a richly detailed portrait that emphasizes his emergence as one the twentieth centuryas most important writers. She chronicles his prewar childhood in a London commuter town and in wartime rural England, his Oxford education, and his apprentice years in Europe and London. From a lifetime of intimate correspondence, she narrates Fowlesas thirty-seven-year love affair with the wife who inspired his most memorable women characters. And she follows the astonishing trajectory of Fowlesas long writing careerafrom his spectacular debut novel, "The Collector" (1963), to the haunting "The French Lieutenantas Woman" (1969), through his later fiction, poems, essays, and translations.