John Knowles (1926-2001). Biography and creative work

The American author John Knowles was born in 1926 in Fairmont, West Virginia. Both Knowles’s father—who worked in the coal industry—and his mother were originally from Massachusetts. According to Knowles, his parents felt that the preparatory schools of the Northeast were the only institutions offering a genuinely broad education. Thus, Knowles’s brother enrolled at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, attending Dartmouth College afterward in New Hampshire. Knowles was also expected to continue this tradition and head to Mercersburg but found an academic prospectus for Phillips Exeter Academy with an accompanying application form and, in his own words, “just for the hell of it, filled it out and mailed it.”

Consequently, at the age of 15, he enrolled as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, a well-known boarding school in New Hampshire. This academy bears a striking resemblance to Devon, the fictional school that features in his critically acclaimed work, A Separate Peace. In 1945, John Knowles graduated from Exeter but chose to defer his entry to college, preferring instead to enlist and join the war effort as a member of the U.S. Army Air Corps’ Aviation Cadet Program. He duly enrolled as a student at Yale University after spending several months with the aviation cadets and obtained his bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1949 from Yale.

For some time after his graduation, Knowles moved to and traveled within Europe, working in the field of journalism until the middle of the 1950s. This experience led him to compile something of an early oeuvre consisting of freelance articles and short stories. In 1957, John Knowles returned to the United States from Europe and landed a position as an associate editor at Holiday magazine. After encouragement from the playwright Thornton Wilder, who expressed keen interest in Knowles’s writing, he then began work toward his first published text, A Separate Peace. Indeed Thornton Wilder was significant in his encouraging Knowles to write about compelling experiences from his past. After his novel gained success and status with the American reading community, Knowles found himself in a position to resign from his employment with Holiday and devote himself to writing full time.

A Separate Peace is based largely upon Knowles’s experiences at Exeter during summer 1943. Despite the resemblance of the Devon School to Phillips Exeter, readers are urged not to consider the plot autobiographical, although Knowles himself confirmed that a considerable amount of the elements in the novel derive from his own personal experiences in this place and at this time. In his memoir entitled Palimpsest, Gore Vidal reveals that he and John Knowles attended Phillips Exeter together, with Vidal being two years older. Gore Vidal also makes it clear that Knowles informed him that Brinker, a central character, is modeled on Vidal himself. “We have been friends for many years now,” Vidal said, “and I admire the novel that he based on our school days, A Separate Peace.”

In addition to A Separate Peace, John Knowles published eight other books; he also wrote a travel book and published a collection of short stories. Knowles’s other major works are Morning in Antibes (1962), Double Vision: American Thoughts Abroad (1964), Indian Summer (1964), The Paragon (1971), and Peace Breaks Out (1981). Despite his early success, none of the later works was as well received as A Separate Peace. In 1960, John Knowles won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for a notable first novel and the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In addition to these honors, Knowles was rewarded with appointments as writer in residence at both Princeton University and the University of North Carolina. Toward the end of his life and in his later years, Knowles lectured at various academic institutions throughout the United States.

Knowles’s major success was his first novel, and none of his other novels achieved the status that A Separate Peace has enjoyed; however, as in his first work, his main themes are greed, competitiveness, and corruption in the lives of wealthy American characters. In an interview, Knowles revealed that his time at Exeter was formative to both his writing and his personal life; the experience took him from the hills of West Virginia, forced him to learn the craft and practice of study and academic scholarship, moved him into Yale, and inspired him to write A Separate Peace, which ensured him a lifetime of fame and financial security. He recalled from Exeter “a lively, congenial group of students in Peabody Hall that summer, many of them from other schools, accelerating like me.”

One such student was David Hackett, who hailed from Milton Academy; he provided the model for Knowles’s protagonist Phineas in A Separate Peace. During his first summer Knowles realized he had “fallen in love with Exeter.” He attributed much of this love to the two consecutive summers he spent at Exeter, in 1943 and 1944. He spent virtually all of his time at Exeter from September 1942 through August 1944, when he graduated. It was, in his own words, “total Exeter immersion.”

Knowles maintained that Exeter “really did have a club whose members jumped from the branch of a very high tree into the river as initiation. 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.” Knowles recalled that after returning to Exeter for the fall term of 1943, he discovered that the motivated, passionate, and driven time that he had experienced on entering the school had dissipated.

By this time, virtually all the young, enthusiastic masters slowly left and moved away, one by one, leaving the more senior staff to teach: “Too old to be in any way companions to us, they forced the class of 1943 to be reliant very much on itself, isolated.” For Knowles, one of his most influential academic mentors was a Latin teacher named Mr. Galbraith, who taught him the intricacies of language, crucially influencing his thinking and his manner of expression. Accordingly, Knowles stated, “I am the writer I am because of him.” He maintained that the best teaching he received was at Exeter.

After moving to Yale soon after his graduation from Exeter, Knowles swiftly became disillusioned with the nature of the academic system, claiming that the style of teaching he endured at Yale was “a distinct let-down.” He found that the academics either read out their recycled lectures en masse in large auditoriums, or, when meeting students in small tutorials, had an unwelcome preoccupation with their careers away from undergraduates.

The academics seemed to be there for their own self-development, as opposed to the benefit of the students. For Knowles, Exeter taught him how to approach fresh and different material, organize his ideas, and express what he knew, felt, and experienced. This fascination with transforming his lived experience into both fiction and travel writing is indicative of Knowles’s works. Running throughout his corpus is the theme of our inherently irrational nature, which Knowles juxtaposes with the social order. Often relying on global conflicts, such as World War II or the Algerian war of the late 1950s, Knowles places his protagonists in existential crises during which they must define themselves in the midst of cataclysmic events.

In the present age of cultural diversity and an increasing awareness of class differences, Knowles’s novels feel antiquated, enshrouding a white world of privilege. Yet as he creates characters who come to terms with human suffering, especially the sort of suffering we all know in that difficult rite of passage that we refer to as adolescence, his works have universal appeal. There is little doubt he will continue to be known for his first novel, the story of a war veteran who reflects upon his life and, in returning to the school where he began to understand himself and from which he left to confront the world, finds a strange mix of emotions: pride in his achievements, nostalgia for a lost era, and guilt over the losses he has known.