A major literary landmark: the first volume of one of the most extraordinary journals of our time In 1963 John Fowles won international recognition with his first published novel The Collector. But his roots as a serious writer can be traced back long before to the journal he began as a student at Oxford in the late 1940s and continued to keep faithfully over the next half century. Written with an unsparing honesty and forthrightness, it reveals the inner thoughts and creative development of one of the twentieth century's most innovative and important novelists. Commencing with his final year at Oxford, this first volume chronicles the year he then spent lecturing at a university in France; his experiences as a young school teacher on the Greek island of Spetsai, which would inspire his second novel The Magus; his love affair there with the married woman who would later become his wife; his return to England and the long struggle to achieve literary success. It reveals not only his devotion to Greek and French culture, but also the huge part that a life-long passion for natural history has played in his life and writing. This first-hand account of the road to fame and fortune holds the reader's attention with all the narrative power of the novels, but also offers an invaluable insight into the intimate relationship between Fowles's own life and his fiction.