A Separate Peace (1959) is a novel by John Knowles. Based on his earlier short story "Phineas", it was Knowles' first published novel and became his best-known work.
Here is a bit of SparkNotes background on author Knowles
(does not give anything away about the plot):
"John Knowles was born in 1926 in Fairmont, West Virginia. He left home at fifteen to attend Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive boarding school located in New Hampshire. After graduating from Exeter in 1945, he spent eight months as an Air Force cadet before enrolling at Yale University, from which he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1949.
"Over the next seven years, Knowles earned his living as a journalist and freelance writer, traveling in Europe and publishing a number of short stories. He befriended the noted playwright Thornton Wilder, a fellow Yale alumnus, who encouraged him in his vocation as a writer. In 1957, Knowles landed a job as an associate editor at Holiday magazine. Two years later, he published his first novel, A Separate Peace, to overwhelmingly favorable reviews; the commercial success of the book allowed him to devote himself to writing full-time. Since 1960, he has published eight other novels, including Peace Breaks Out, the companion volume to A Separate Peace, and a number of stories. None, however, has garnered the acclaim or audience that A Separate Peace has enjoyed and continues to enjoy today. Knowles has served as a writer-in-residence at Princeton University and at the University of North Carolina, and he continues to lecture widely."
Now irony of ironies, my husband spent a summer enrolled at Exeter. The book takes place during WWII and my husband was there in 1977, so there is no definite link there. If you are wondering, Exeter was coed by the time my husband was there. I think it admitted girls after 1971. My husband enjoyed Exeter very much. He lived and went to school in Iowa. I suspect that Exeter summer was his mother's way of impressing her friends and broadening my husband's horizons and emptying her house. His one year older brother went to Andover the same summer. The two older boys were off somewhere that summer too. My husband remembers canoeing on the river. It was the first time he played tennis on clay courts (my husband was competitive tennis player at local level from age 6 or 7 until just a couple years ago). He remembers Zach B was his best friend. He remembers getting to see a tennis tournament (big names, Boston). He remembers the book store and the library, and having a great time and enjoying himself. In fact he almost went to high school there. He would have had to repeat his sophomore year in order to switch schools, so, he did not transfer.
I didn't know one thing about A Separate Peace, before I started. I just went where the book took me.
It was another book about boys (Lord of the Flies, The Chocolate War).
This book did not bother me as I have a good eye for catching foreshadowing. I was pretty sure I knew what was coming. It didn't come in the way I thought, but it did come. I did shed a couple tears over the characters, but not in a sinking way.
I thought this was a wonderful book.
My husband checked it out of the library and is listening to it now.
