The development and resolution of tensions between Gene and Finny provide the well-balanced structure of A Separate Peace, as several critics have noted. What has not been appreciated, however, is the ambiguity of the boys' conflict in its several phases, an ambiguity expressed in both character and symbol. The story is not a simple allegory of man's fortunate or unfortunate fall from innocence, or even an extension of that theological debate to the process of growing up, though both of these ...

Professor Halio's recent appreciation of the two short novels of John Knowles [see excerpt above] was especially welcome. Knowles's work, and in particular his fine first novel, A Separate Peace, has not yet received the close attention it merits. In a time that has seen high praise for fat, awkwardly-managed novels, he stands out as a precise and economical craftsman. For this alone he demands serious consideration. Although Professor Halio calls attention to this technical achievement—...

To read A Separate Peace is to discover a novel which is completely satisfactory and yet so provocative that the reader wishes immediately to return to it. John Knowles' achievement is due, I believe, to his having successfully imbued his characters and setting with a symbolism that while informative is never oppressive. Because of this the characters and the setting retain both the vitality of verisimilitude and the psychological tension of symbolism. What happens in the novel is that Gene Forrester...

It may be too early to attempt more than a tentative appraisal of the overall achievement of John Knowles. Certainly one can say that he ranks among the most promising young American novelists; and one can recognize the obvious fact that A Separate Peace … has become a small classic among college students and seems likely to last for some time. His other novels, however, have only been noticed in passing: Morning in Antibes and Indian Summer have not really been analyzed and evaluated. Nor is there a...

The topic of this article will be not innocence but freedom, the Greek theme of A Separate Peace. (p. 1269) Knowles is concerned with the implications of certain Greek ideas: the necessity and effects of freedom, and its corollary ideal of arete: the individual's fulfillment of his own excellences—moral, physical, intellectual, and political. In the first half, Phineas reflects these concerns.

The continuing appeal of "A Separate Peace" has little to do with its wartime atmosphere, though that is well handled. Rather, the attraction is its central character, Phineas, the 16-year-old epitome of "schoolboy glamour" who is done to death over the course of a school year. Phineas, with his gift for fantasy, capacity for affection and sheer physical grace, must stand somewhere between [F. Scott Fitzgerald's] Gatsby and [John Irving's] Garp in the spectrum of Am...

In Peace Breaks Out, John Knowles revisits Devon School, the New Hampshire prep school that provided the setting for his 1950s best seller, A Separate Peace. Perceptively and sensitively written, A Separate Peace movingly chronicled the struggle between two adolescents who, too young to enlist, discover the enemy not in Europe or in the Pacific, but in themselves. Unfortunately, Knowles' new novel lacks the power and tightly wrought structure of his earlier work. The time of Peace Breaks Out is Septe...

[A Separate Peace], modest as it is in tone, is likely to leave you thinking. The misuse of science now makes it necessary to articulate a new and purely practical form of Pacifism, a Pacifism which, free of crankiness and owing nothing to religious sensitivity, depends entirely on simple common sense. From now on, people must say, war will mean not only a shortage of cakes and ale but the end of everything. It is this form of protest, of personal withdrawal from political folly which, among other things, m...

In 1960 A Separate Peace catapulted Knowles both to international prominence and to life as a full-time novelist. Unfortunately, with each succeeding work … Knowles has gradually been relegated to the gloomy circle of those who fail to realize their initial promise. Sad to say, A Vein of Riches will not restore him to public and critical favor. John Knowles's latest book chronicles the fortunes of the Catherwood family of Middleburg, West Virginia from the early 1900s to the mid 1920s…....

John Knowles's first book, "A Separate Peace," was one of those legendary adolescent novels, passed hand to hand around the dormitories at Groton, buoyed into successive paperback editions by that most valuable of commercial assets, an underground reputation. It was a very special book, about a special type of Eastern prep-school kid, and it was notable for two qualities: a complete absence of humor and a curious air of self-seriousness, as if it had been composed in the service of a 16...

[A Separate Peace] is, indeed, a novel of altogether exceptional power and distinction. [Mr. Knowles] writes of a New England preparatory school—what over here would be called a public school—and of two sixteen-year-olds in particular, Finny and Gene, the narrator, who looks back on his wartime schooldays from the standpoint of his present adulthood. It would be easy to say that Finny is the brilliant, outward-looking athlete, Gene the first-class brain and subtle self-analyser, and that from ...

"A Separate Peace," John Knowles' first novel, is a consistently admirable exercise in the craft of fiction—disciplined, precise, witty and always completely conscious of intention and effect—and yet, in spite of these rare assets (or perhaps because of them), the novel's final effect is one of remoteness and aridity. The theme, that of the corroding flaw in friendship between young males, has engaged the talents of such disparate writers as Thomas Mann, William Max...

Most people remember John Knowles as the author of A Separate Peace, a brief, enormously popular novel which searchingly studied the lives of two boys on the brink of adulthood. The writing was low-keyed, but it seemed to capture perfectly the quicksilver mental atmosphere of that stage of adolescence. In A Vein of Riches, Knowles turns to a different subject—the expansion and collapse of the "King Coal" industry in West Virginia from 1909 to 1924—and to a new genre—a Drei...

John Knowles, author of the highly acclaimed A Separate Peace, has now written a soap operatic historical novel about a coal baron's family in West Virginia that loses its money but discovers "things that really mean a lot more." That A Vein of Riches refers not just to the novel's coal boom setting but also to these newly plumbed human feelings and values is a point Knowles wants very badly for us not to miss…. By relentlessly spelling everything out, Knowles demonstrates...

[A Separate Peace, Knowles's] excellent first novel, is remarkable not only for the virtues it possesses but for the faults it lacks. There is little of the melodrama customary in books about adolescence. There is no Wolfeian confluence of the literary and the pituitary—the youthful poet growing an inch a month on a diet of a book a day. The author is no more sentimental or romantic about his hero than Stephen Crane was about the protagonist of The Red Badge of Courage. The books are similar i...

A Separate Peace is a short, thoughtful, ambitious American study of a fatal relationship between two upper-class schoolboys in late adolescence during the war…. There are several abrupt and pleasing variations from conventional American attitudes, including a pretence that the war does not exist. Mr Knowles has clearly worked hard on this novel, modelling it carefully on the best neo-Forsterian, Trillingesque lines. Yet somehow it just fails to convince. The school background exerts none of the fasc...