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...

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 cracks may shorten its life but they won't seriously impair the pleasure of reading it. Knowles, who got his medals for "A Separate Peace," is an intelligent man telling us things we need to know about ourselves. He tells them well. The title is important. It's not "A Paragon." It's "The Pa...

Did you admire John Knowles's first novel, "A Separate Peace"? After floundering somewhat in his three subsequent novels ("Morning in Antibes," "Phineas" and "The Paragon"), Mr. Knowles seems to be in firm control again in "Spreading Fires." At least for a while, he does. A lot of tension builds on the surface of this story about a strange cook named Neville who comes with a villa in the South of France that Brendan Lucas has rente...

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," the Yale campus of "The Paragon." At their best these short, intense novels are quite fine; in particular, Knowles has displayed a sensitive and unsentimental appreciation of the real and imagined agonies of young men as they go through the rites of passage. But "A Vein of Riches" is something else again…. It pai...

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 Riches]. Knowles exercises masterful discrimination, both in his choice of characters and in his selection of the details to portray those characters, making the novel richly readable. The Catherwoods are the wealthiest and most influential family in Middleburg, West Virginia, depicted at the height of their power—during the coal boom of ...

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 picturesque), changes into a psychological study, and ends up a thriller. The main character, Brendan; his sister, Miriam; their mother, Marietta; and Miriam's lover, Xavier make up a villa-full of flawed personalities trying to cope with a psychotic servant, Neville. They cope badly, supposedly highlighting their own problems. It do...

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" are set in a boy's boarding school. In both Mr. Knowles gives a nostalgic view of memorable boys and the educational system. "The Peeping Tom" is a painfully personal drama of a young man's meaningless life. While "Martin the Fisherman" is little more than a vignette, "The Reading of the Wil...

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 a "city of a hundred millionaires," among them the Catherwood family. Clarkson, the husband and father, head of one of the larger companies, is too engrossed in business affairs to pay much attention to his son, Lyle, an only child, or Minnie, his wife, who finds escape in a "born again" religious experience…....

[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 Colfax, a decided original in spirit and behavior, as he seeks to express his assorted doubts and talents and strives to surmount the strangeness and failure that he considers inescapable in his family heritage. Characterization often slips into caricature, less so with Louis himself and young Charlotte—whom he loses because he feels unrea...

[Phineas is] concerned mainly with the psychological problems of American male adolescents. Admirers of Mr. Knowles's well-known novel, A Separate Peace, will recognize in the title story, as well as in "A Turn in the Sun," much of the source material for A Separate Peace. Competent, sophisticated, and a master of place description, Mr. Knowles also dramatizes as well as anyone I know the torments—especially the torments of ostracism—suffered by the sensitive and intellige...