Biography EssayJohn 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 youn...
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[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. ...
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Critical Essay by Jonathan Yardley
Up to now John Knowles has been something of a miniaturist, his novels and stories set in close quarters: the boarding school of "A Separate Peace," th...
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Critical Essay by Granville Hicks
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...
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Critical Essay by Robert H. Donahugh
Youth is dominant in five of the six stories comprising this distinguished collection [Phineas and Other Stories]. The title story and "A Turn With the Sun&...
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Critical Essay by James P. Degnan
[Phineas is] concerned mainly with the psychological problems of American male adolescents. Admirers of Mr. Knowles's well-known novel, A Separate Peace, will ...
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Critical Essay by Peter Wolfe
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 i...
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Critical Essay by Webster Schott
John Knowles has written a beautiful, funny, moving novel about a young man in trouble. If "The Paragon" is flawed—and I think it is—the cr...
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Critical Essay by The Booklist
[In The Paragon Knowles] again shows empathy with young people. With considerable freewheeling humor and light irony he depicts the Yale University scene and Louis Colfa...
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Critical Essay by Larry Gray
A Separate Peace proves that John Knowles is a good writer. Spreading Fires does not. It begins like a travelogue (the setting is Cannes, a town that lends itself to the p...
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Critical Essay by Christopher Lehmann-haupt
Did you admire John Knowles's first novel, "A Separate Peace"? After floundering somewhat in his three subsequent novels ("Morni...
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Critical Essay by Agnes C. Ringer
West Virginia in the boom days of the coal industry is the locale for [A Vein of Riches, a] rather pedestrian novel which opens in 1909 when coal has made Middleburg ...
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Critical Essay by Diane J. Swanbrow
Coal mining has yielded literary riches for several generations, and John Knowles strikes yet another solid vein in this tale of his native West Virginia [A Vein of...
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Critical Essay by Jay L. Halio
[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 ...
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John Knowles
John Knowles
