A Separate Peace
John Knowles
Set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.
-- Scribner book jacket |
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John Knowles John Knowles (1926-2001), an American author, was best known for his first published novel, A Separate Peace (1959). Most of his works are psychological examinations of characters caught in conflict between the wild and the pragmatic sides of their personalities. (Read his New York Times obituary here.)
In 1945 Knowles graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H., and briefly served in the military before attending Yale University. He contributed articles to various publications in the 1950s before becoming a full-time writer. In the 1960s Knowles was a writer in residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Princeton University, and in the 1990s he taught creative writing at Florida Atlantic University. In 1959 Knowles won acclaim with the publication of A Separate Peace, which chronicles the competitive friendship of two students at a New England preparatory school during World War II. An enduring classic, it became part of the syllabus of high-school English classes throughout the United States. Its sequel, Peace Breaks Out (1981), features student rivalry in the same setting but viewed from the perspective of a troubled young teacher who has recently returned from World War II. Knowles’s other novels include Indian Summer (1966), The Paragon (1971), A Vein of Riches (1978), A Stolen Past (1983), The Private Life of Axie Reed (1986), the travelogue Double Vision (1964), and Phineas (1968), a collection of short stories. -- Britannica.com |