John Knowles

John Knowles ; September 16, 1926 – November 29, 2001) was an American
novelist best known for A separate peace (1959). He died in 2001 at the age of
75.
Knowles was born in Fairmont, West Virginia, the son of James M. Knowles, a
purchasing agent from Lowell, Maschussetes and Mary Beatrice Shea Knowles
from Concord, New Hampshire. His father was vice president of a coal company,
earning an income which afforded them a comfortable living. Knowles attended
St. Peter's High School in Fairmont, West Virginia from 1938 until 1940, before
continuing at Phillips Ester Academy in Exter, New Hampshire, graduating in
1945.
Following his time at Phillips Exeter, Knowles spent two years serving in the U.S
Army Forces in World War II.
Knowles graduated from Yale University as a member of the class of 1949. While
at Yale, Knowles contributed stories to campus humor magazine The Yale
Record and served on the board of the Yale Daily News during his sophomore,
junior and senior years, notably as editorial secretary during his senior year. He
was a record-holding varsity swimmer during his sophomore year.
Early in Knowles's career, he wrote for the Hartford Courant and was assistant
editor for Holiday magazine. With encouragement from Thornton Wilder, he
concurrently began writing novels.
Knowles was born in 1926, in Fairmont, West Virginia. He spent his childhood in
the small town of a coal-mining region, attending public schools. At 15, he left
Fairmont for Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite prep school in New Hampshire.
Knowles found Exeter both socially and academically challenging, and his
experiences there inspired at least two of his later works: A Separate Peace
(1959) and Peace Breaks Out (1981), in which Exeter is reconceived as Devon
School.
Knowles graduated early from Exeter in August 1947 because of his participation
in the summer Anticipatory Program, a special wartime term, like Devon's
Summer Session, meant to prepare boys for military service. In the fall of 1944,
Knowles entered Yale University to study English. After serving for eight months
in the U.S. Army Air Corps, Knowles returned to Yale, receiving a Bachelor of
Arts degree in 1949.
After graduating from college, Knowles worked as a reporter for the Hartford
Courant and occasionally wrote theater reviews for the newspaper. By 1952, he
was a freelance writer, with several articles published in Holiday magazine,
where he became an associate editor. The success of A Separate Peace gave
Knowles the financial freedom to devote himself entirely to writing fiction.
Early in his career, Knowles wrote a novel that was never published and a short
story that appeared in a small fiction magazine. He began to experiment with the
material that would inspire the early chapters of A Separate Peace with the short
story "Phineas," published in Cosmopolitan in 1956.
Knowles submitted his completed novel to American publishers, but the
manuscript was rejected. Knowles found a British publisher, Secker and
Warburg, for his work. A Separate Peace appeared in 1959 and quickly earned
the praise of British reviewers. By the spring of 1960, when the New York edition
came out, American critics were acclaiming the novel as well.
The success of the novel freed Knowles to write and to travel. His next two
books, the novel Morning in Antibes (1962) and Double Vision: American
Thoughts from Abroad (1964), a collection of travel essays, take for their
inspiration Knowles' wanderings on the Riviera and in the Middle East.
With Indian Summer (1966), Knowles returned to the theme of boyhood
friendships he had explored in A Separate Peace, but critics declared the new
novel a disappointment compared to Knowles' first great work. Knowles found a
new subject and tone in Spreading Fires (1974), a gothic thriller set on the
Riviera. He explored the effects of the past on the present in A Stolen Past
(1983) and The Private Life of Axie Reed (1986). His West Virginia childhood
inspired A Vein of Riches (1978), a historical novel about coal mining.
Returning to New England themes, Knowles set The Paragon (1971) at Yale
University and then finally came back to the fictional Devon School with Peace
Breaks Out (1981). Again, critics praised the author's craft, but most agreed that
the best novel written by Knowles was his first, A Separate Peace.

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John Knowles ; September 16, 1926 – November 29, 2001) was an American

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