Background

A Separate Peace falls under the banner of literary realism, where aspects familiar to the author or readers are represented as they are, with minimal speculations. The primary characters Gene and Finny may seem quite similar to Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, especially Finny, but Knowles’ characters certainly feel more realistic, helped by the novel certainly not falling under the blanket of satire. The characters feel like real characters, not mere caricatures that Twain’s creations come off as, and the journey of maturity by two boys struggling with relationships and their difficulties of accepting a world at war runs parallel to the experiences of many in 1960 who grew up during times of war and were at school in 1944.

The book is also a war novel, but not in the conventional sense of the term. A Separate Peace looks at war from the lens of the characters that Knowles created. As the boys change and grow up, so does their view and acceptance of war. Viewed at first as a novelty and removed because of their physical distance from the locations of battles and the bubble that their academy seemed to be, war soon morphs into an entity that is very much real and a somber affair.

Knowles attempts a throwback to the setting of Devon School in the novel Peace Breaks Out, the work not meeting anywhere near the success of A Separate Peace. By this time, Knowles had already made a mark in the literary world with his first work, and some see his use of the Devon school once again a means to capitalize on the popularity of his first novel, but that interpretation is both uncertain and is best left to the individual reader. On the other hand, what can be held certain is that without A Separate Peace, Knowles’ name would not have found its way with the likes of J. D. Salinger (author of Catcher in the Rye), and without Wilder’s encouragement and suggestion, A Separate Peace may never have been written.