A Separate Peace
(John Knowles)

John Knowles was born in West Virginia in 1926. In 1941, at the age of fifteen, Knowles left home to attend Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 1945.

Upon graduation, he spent less than one year in the Air Force and subsequently attended Yale University, from which he graduated in 1949. Upon graduation from Yale, Knowles was employed as a freelance writer as well as a journalist.

It was Knowles’ friend and fellow Yale alumnus Thornton Wilder who convinced him to continue his pursuits as a writer, and he was successful in publishing numerous short stories before having his first novel, “A Separate Peace”, published in 1959. Though Knowles had eight other novels published, none of them had the success of his first. “A Separate Peace” has been critically acclaimed and continues to be very successful to this day.

As the adage goes, “write what you know”, and that is exactly what Knowles did. “A Separate Peace” is set in a boarding school, much like the one Knowles attended in his adolescence.

The character of Gene Forrester is a lot like Knowles in that he is a transplant from the South, attending a boarding school in the New England area during the Second World War. Many of the activities and characters in the novel are based on experiences that Knowles himself witnessed and was party to at Exeter. Knowles has made it clear that the more vicious and darker themes of the novel are purely fictional, as he greatly enjoyed his time at Exeter and did not have the same negative experiences as his characters.