Author Bio & Introduction

Born in 1926 in Fairmont, West Virginia, John Knowles was an American novelist who found his fame with his novel A Separate Peace. After studying at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, and graduating in 1945, at the end of World War II, Knowles went on to serve in the US Army Air Forces for around eight months. After graduating from Yale University in 1949, Knowles worked as an assistant editor for Holiday magazine. Knowles traveled around Europe for a while and worked in the field of journalism before being swayed by Thornton Wilder, the author of Our House, who encouraged him to begin writing novels with his personal life experiences as the foundation, something Wilder himself did with his works.

Despite having experience in publishing short stories, A Separate Peace became the breakthrough publication for Knowles, prompting his career as an author. The book was published in 1960, a year after Knowles had the novel published in England in 1959 due to difficulties in securing an American publisher. Knowles went on to publish eight more novels, including the companion novel Peace Breaks Out, and several other literary works. A Separate Peace, being his first novel to be published, was the most successful and memorable work written by Knowles, his other works pale in comparison. This did not stop him from having a career as an author; A Separate Peace ensured Knowles could afford to hold onto a career as a writer for the rest of his life, affording him opportunities to explore new themes and subject matters in future works.

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Knowles was a writer-in-residence at both Princeton University and the University of North Carolina before passing away in 2001.

In A Separate Peace, as a work of literary realism, Knowles uses his memories of joys, anger, hate, envy, fights, games and play, friendships, etc., to help build the novel and make the characters relatable to readers in the US in 1960. The school in the novel is a transposition of Knowles’ own experience of the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, the school where he did study. Yet, the transposition of personal experiences at the Phillips Exeter Academy by Knowles in A Separate Peace does not encompass the problematic social unrest or calamity of war — both aspects from which Knowles could afford to be free. The novel focuses on the journey into manhood, personal connections, emotional struggles, and the reality of war, all of them aspects that are deeply personal to many in the US.