John Knowles, Novelist

John Knowles was a famous American author, whose A Separate Peace has been read by millions of students and is considered by some to be one of the best English-language novels.

John Knowles (September 16, 1926 - November 29, 2001), born Fairmont, West Virginia, was an American novelist, best known for his novel A Separate Peace.

A 1945 graduate of the Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, Knowles graduated from Yale University in 1949.

A Separate Peace is based upon Knowles's experiences at Exeter during the summer of 1943. The setting, "The Devon School," is a thinly veiled fictionalization of Philips Exeter. The plot should not be taken as autobiographical. In his essay, A Special Time, A Special Place Knowles writes: "The only elements in A Separate Peace which were not in that summer were anger, envy, violence, and hatred. There was only friendship, athleticism, and loyalty."

Gore Vidal in his memoirs Palimpsest, acknowledges that he and Knowles concurrently attended Phillips Exeter, with Vidal two years ahead. Vidal claims that Knowles told him that the character Brinker, who precipitates the novel's crisis, is based on Vidal. "We have been friends for many years now," Vidal says, "and I admire the novel that he based on our school days, A Separate Peace." A Separate Peace is widely included on high-school curricula. The novel's homoerotic subtext continues to stimulate spirited debate.

Knowles's other significant works are Morning in Antibes, Double Vision: American Thoughts Abroad, Indian Summer, The Paragon, and Peace Breaks Out. None of these later works were as well received as A Separate Peace. In sum, Knowles was the author of seven novels, a book on travel, and a collection of stories. Mr. Knowles was a winner of the William Faulkner Award and The Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He used to lecture widely to university audiences.

Mr. Knowles wrote many books, but A Separate Peace and its sequel, Peace Breaks Out (Bantam, 1982), are his only novels still in print. His later novels, including A Vein of Riches (1978), received respectful reviews but never captured a mass audience.

John Knowles, whose coming-of-age novel A Separate Peace became required reading for generations of high school students, died on Thursday, November 29, 2001 at a convalescent home in a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was 75. Mr. Knowles died after a short illness, said his lawyer, Kenneth Hart.

Encouraged by Thornton Wilder to write about his most vivid memories, Mr. Knowles based A Separate Peace, his first novel, on his years at Phillips Exeter Academy.

A Separate Peace, which is set in the fictional Devon School during World War II, explores themes of loyalty, cruelty, betrayal and original sin.

A principal question raised by the book and long debated by readers is whether the novel's schoolboy protagonist, Gene Forrester, intentionally causes his athletic friend Phineas to fall from a tree and suffer a leg injury that cripples him and indirectly leads to his death.

"John used to say he would never answer that question," his brother-in-law, Bob Maxwell, said when announcing Mr. Knowles's death. "He took that one with him."

The closest Mr. Knowles came to explaining the origin of the novel was in an interview for The South Florida Sun-Sentinel shortly after he moved to Fort Lauderdale in 1987. A Separate Peace is based on experiences that I had, but it is not literally true," he said.

Published by Macmillan in 1960, A Separate Peace won the William Faulkner Foundation Award and the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and soon came to be compared to classics like The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

The novel, which drew good reviews, was also a huge commercial success, selling more than eight million copies. In 1972 it was made into a film by Paramount Pictures.

In 1971 Jonathan Yardley said in The New Republic that Mr. Knowles was "foundering — writing with characteristic grace and intelligence, but groping uncertainly for new subjects and themes."

John Knowles was born on September 16, 1926, in Fairmont, West Virginia, and entered Exeter at 15. He graduated in 1945 and received his bachelor's degree from Yale in 1949.

He worked as a reporter and drama critic for The Hartford Courant for a few years and then served as associate editor of Holiday, the travel magazine, from 1956 to 1960. He was also a freelance writer.

Mr. Knowles is survived by two sisters, Dorothy Maxwell, of Oro Valley, Arizona and Marjorie Johnson, of Dallas; and a brother, James, of San Francisco.

Mr. Knowles once told an interviewer that he did not mind having his reputation rest on a single book. "It's paid the bills for 30 years," he said. "It has made my career possible. Unlike most writers, I don't have to do anything else to make a living."

"I think it is the best-written, best designed and most moving novel I have read in many years. Beginning with a tiny incident among ordinary boys, it ends by being as deep and as big as evil itself. As I read the story, I had the feeling of climbing a tower and looking at wider and wider prospects of human nature, each bleaker than the last ... The characters are real, the tragedy is inevitable, the setting is perfectly chosen. I shall recommend this book to anyone who tells me that the novel is no longer a work of art." Aubrey Menen

"A quietly vital and cleanly written novel that moves, page by page, toward a most interesting target." Truman Capote

"Is he (Knowles) the successor to Salinger for whom we have been waiting so long?" Encounter

"Mr. Knowles has something to say about youth and war that few contemporary novelists have attempted to say and has said better. He deals with youth's special friendships with great delicacy and understanding; what is more, he writes with wit and style, these two qualities so rare these days we sometimes think they have been lost forever." Warren Miller

A Separate Peace; a novel, London, Secker & Warburg, 1959; New York, Macmillan Co., 1960

Morning in Antibes; a novel, New York, Macmillan, 1962

Double Vision; American Thoughts Abroad, New York, Macmillan, 1964

Indian Summer, New York, Random House, 1966

Phineas; six stories, New York, Random House, 1968

The Paragon; a novel, New York, Random House, c. 1971

A Special Time, A Special Place, Exeter Bulletin, 1995 (autobiographical note on internet)

Spreading Fires, New York, Random House, 1974

A Vein of Riches, Boston, Little Brown, 1978

Peace Breaks Out, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981

A Stolen Past, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983

The Private Life of Axie Reed, New York : Jesse Grunberg, 1986