[This entry was updated by Hallman Bell Bryant (Clemson University) from the entry by Robert M. Nelson (University of Richmond) in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, volume 6, pp. 120-135.] John Knowles, the third of four children...

John Knowles, the third of four children of James Myron and Mary Beatrice Shea Knowles, was born in Fairmont, West Virginia. He has an older brother and sister who are twins, and a younger sister. Knowles left West Virginia at fifteen to attend the...

Roscoe Bartlett, the 80-year-old Maryland congressman/seer who is trying to bring our attention to the coming crisis in oil supplies, a crisis of which the recent gas-price increases (which demagogues like Barbara Boxer would prefer to regard as price-gouging) are a mere foretaste. My job...

The reason I was at the Wyndham, I was attending the Andover commencement (my wife's niece). There was something thrilling about it, something else crushing. The thrilling thing is that diversity is today a bold insurmountable fact of elite culture. The graduating class was filled...

At the Perch Café on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, where neighborhood parents take their tots for early-morning sing-alongs, Roxanne Jacobson was buckling her son, 17-month-old Geir, into his stroller the other day. “It’s Norwegian,” she said of his name. “I love the sound of...

John Knowles's concern with morality colors all his books. This preoccupation finds its most general expression in a question asked in Double Vision …, an informal travel journal: "Can man prevail against the bestiality he himself has struggled out of by a supreme effort?" Knowles's novels, instead of attacking the question head-on, go about it indirectly. They ask, first, whether a person can detach himself from his background—his society, his tradition, and the pr...

[It is] heartening to see a few like John Knowles who, taking his cue from [Ernest Hemingway's] The Sun Also Rises rather than from [Hemingway's] For Whom the Bell Tolls, has brought back to recent fiction some of the clear craftsmanship and careful handling of form that characterizes our earlier and best fiction in this century. (p. 107) [Before] man can be redeemed back into social life, he must first come to terms with himself, he must first—as has been said so often of American writ...

Indian Summer is a selection of the Literary Guild, and in the Guild's bulletin for August, Knowles says that the book "came about through the collision in my mind of two things: a strange little town I knew in Connecticut, and the friendships I have formed with people who later turned out to be very rich." This, however, was not the whole story: "But in essence what I tried for in Indian Summer was neither a novel of place nor a novel about great wealth. I wished instead to expr...