by John Knowles

John Knowles was born in 1926 and attended the prestigious New England boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy in the early 1940s. The following decade Knowles wrote his first published novel, A Separate Peace. At the time that Knowles attended Exeter, graduating students faced the choice of volunteering for the armed forces or the likely possibility of being drafted to fight in World War II. Although to many the war seemed to be taking place in distant and strange lands, Knowles's novel demonstrates how it became an increasingly concrete reality for high school boys nearing graduation.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

Attitudes toward a distant war. By 1940 Nazi Germany had invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia and was involved in a full-scale war against France and England that would soon involve Russia as well. Meanwhile, the Americans leaned toward a...