John Knowles was born
in 1926 in Fairmont, West Virginia. He left
home at fifteen to attend Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive
boarding school located in New Hampshire. After graduating from
Exeter in 1945, he spent eight months as
an Air Force cadet before enrolling at Yale University, from which he
earned a bachelor’s degree in 1949.
Over the next seven years, Knowles earned his living as
a journalist and freelance writer, traveling in Europe and publishing
a number of short stories. He befriended the noted playwright Thornton Wilder,
a fellow Yale alumnus, who encouraged him in his vocation as a writer.
In 1957, Knowles landed a job as an associate
editor at Holiday magazine. Two years later, he
published his first novel, A Separate Peace, to
overwhelmingly favorable reviews; the commercial success of the
book allowed him to devote himself to writing full-time. Since 1960,
he has published eight other novels, including Peace Breaks
Out, the companion volume to A Separate Peace, and a
number of stories. None, however, has garnered the acclaim or audience
that A Separate Peace has enjoyed and continues
to enjoy today. Knowles has served as a writer-in-residence at Princeton
University and at the University of North Carolina, and he continues
to lecture widely.
The plot and setting of A Separate Peace were
largely inspired by Knowles’s experiences at Exeter. Like Gene Forrester,
one of the novel’s two principal characters, Knowles was a student
from the South studying in New Hampshire during World War II—although he
graduated a year too late to serve overseas during the war. Like his
characters, Knowles also attended two summer sessions in 1943 and 1944,
and even participated in a club whose members had to jump out of
a tall tree into a river as an initiation stunt—a club much like
the “Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session” founded by Gene
and his friend Finny in A Separate Peace. He has
told interviewers that he modeled the character of Finny after another
member of this club named David Hackett, who later served under Robert
F. Kennedy in the Department of Justice.
Yet while Knowles bases many of the book’s circumstances
on his own experiences at Exeter, he has always emphatically noted
that the book’s larger themes have no factual basis—that his own
high school years were not plagued by the issues of envy, violence,
and alienation that pervade the novel. He has written that he thoroughly enjoyed
his time at the school and adds that he sought to convey his love
and appreciation for it in A Separate Peace. Indeed,
his treatment of “Devon” in the novel would seem to bear these statements out:
despite its dark tone and perhaps pessimistic view of the human condition,
the novel offers an ultimately positive and even nostalgic perspective
of boarding-school life. Unlike other, more recent accounts of exclusive
boarding-school culture, which have tended to portray the educational
system itself as an oppressive force (in such films as Dead
Poets Society and Scent of a Woman), Knowles chooses
to locate his characters’ difficulties not in the strict boarding-school
system but within their own hearts.
