John Fowles takes the tree and the forest as the best analogues of prose fiction, symbolizing the green man or the wild part of our psyche from which the artistic impulse is born. He explains the impact of nature on his own life and warns civilized man of the deeper and more subtle dangers that attend his traditional rejection of the wild and the chaos it has come to represent. The author also wrote The Collector, The Aristos, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Ebony Tower, Daniel Martin and Maggot.