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.
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 policy of isolationism, preferring to not become embroiled in the conflicts of other continents. World War I had inflicted heavy casualties on U.S. troops; mindful of this recent painful experience, Americans were content to stay isolated from what seemed to be distant European conflicts. As late as 1941, the magazine New Republic echoed a sentiment then in vogue, asserting that it "is not a mark of barren isolationism to believe with all one's heart and soul that the best contribution Americans can make to the future of humanity is to fulfill democracy in the United States" (O'Neill, p.
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