John Knowles was born on September 16, 1926 in the coal mining town of Fairmont, West Virginia and attended public school in that area until he was 15. In the fall of 1942, Knowles entered the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. The bulk of his experience there laid the groundwork for what would become the center of events described in A Separate Peace. He attended an Exeter summer session during which there was a secret society whose initiation rite was to jump out of a tree into the river below, similar to Gene's description of Finny's Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session. At one point, Knowles himself fell out of that tree and was on crutches when the following fall session began. Like Gene Forrester, he was a Southern boy being schooled in "Yankee" territory and it took time for him to adjust. Knowles did very well, however, and after graduating from Phillips Exeter in August 1944, he attended Yale University for one semester before enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Force.
After being discharged from the military at the end of World War II, Knowles returned to Yale and graduated with a BA in English in 1949. He worked as a reporter for The Hartford Courant for two years before traveling throughout Western Europe and Italy. He took a position at Holiday magazine in New York City where several of his short stories were published, including "Phineas," in 1956, which laid the groundwork for his novel, A Separate Peace. This book was published in Britain in 1959, and soon after was distributed in the United States. A Separate Peace was acclaimed as a huge success, winning the Rosenthal Award, the William Faulkner Award and a nomination for the National Book Award. John Knowles resigned from Holiday and spent his time writing and traveling throughout Europe and the Middle East. Although eleven novels follow the publication of A Separate Peace, none of them managed to find the same degree of success as his first novel. The book continues to be met with great popularity and praise among high school and university students.
A Separate Peace is a coming-of-age novel. It is Knowles' own memory and emotions from his school days at Phillips Exeter Academy that have made the book demonstrate a sensitive understanding about the conflicts of youth, especially at the pivotal age of sixteen, when one is neither a child nor a man. Eleven years after graduating from this beloved school, he returned to its campus for the first time to revisit the places he remembered from his youth, examining them with the eyes of an adult. Gene Forrester is very much the same as he returns to Devon School after fifteen years, remembering not only his times with Finny, but also the sights and sounds that had filled the campus in his youth. It was so peaceful, despite the fact that a great war was being waged elsewhere in the world. Here he was free for a little while longer to simply be a boy and frolic in the summer heat. One of the reasons Knowles' later books lack critical acclaim is because some of them echo the same tone and subject matter that he first created in A Separate Peace, often focusing on the problems of youth growing into men, and the emotional conflicts that this transition creates.
John Knowles lived for a time in Southampton, Long Island where he lectured widely to university audiences. He later served as writer-in-residence at both the University of North Carolina and Princeton University. Knowles now resides in Fort Lauderdale, Florida where he continues to write a work-in-progress, My Life in Writing: A Kind of Autobiography. Other novels include Morning in Antibes (1962), Indian Summer (1966), The Paragon (1971), Spreading Fires (1974), A Vein of Riches (1978), Peace Breaks Out (1981), and The Private Life of Axie Reed (1986) among others.
Bibliography
Bryant, Hallman Bell. A Separate Peace: The War Within. Twayne Publishers: Boston, 1990.
Knowles, John. A Separate Peace. Bantam Books: New York, 1959.
Knowles, John. Phineas: Six Stories. Random House: New York, 1968.
McDougal-Littell. "Author Spotlight: John Knowles." Available online at: http://www.mcdougallittell.com/lit/guest/knowles/
The Exeter Bulletin, Summer 1995. "A Special Time, A Special School." Commentary by John Knowles. Available online at: http://www.exeter.edu/library1/separate_peace/article.html
