John Knowles
Biographical Information
John Knowles was born in Fairmont, WV, September 16, 1926. He left home at the age of 16 to attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a New Hampshire boarding school. Knowles graduated from Phillips Exeter in 1945, then spent eight months in the U.S. Army Air Force's Aviation Cadet Program. He enrolled in Yale University, completing a bachelor's degree in 1949. After Yale, he became a reporter for the Hartford, Connecticut Courant, a position he left in 1952 to become a freelance writer. Knowles remained a freelancer for the next four years, until he became an associate editor for Holiday magazine in 1956. He spent those years traveling through Italy and southern France. He also wrote his first novel during this time, the unpublished Descent into Proselito. His first published novel, A Separate Peace, was published in 1959 in England and a year later in the United States. When it became clear that A Separate Peace was going to be a publishing success, Knowles resigned his position at Holiday to embark on a two-year tour of Europe and the Middle East. His second novel, Morning in Antibes, was published in 1962 while Knowles was still abroad. Double Vision: American Thoughts Abroad (1964) is a chronicle of this two-year journey.
He returned to the United States in the early sixties, though he continued to spend time abroad in between periods as writer-in-residence [University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1963-4); Princeton University (1968-9)] and time in New York City. His third novel, Indian Summer was published in 1966 followed by the short story collection Phineas in 1968. Knowles father died in 1970, the same year the writer took up permanent residence in Southampton, Long Island. He continued to write, publishing six more novels over the next two decades. In 1978, he donated his early longhand manuscripts to the Phillips Exeter Academy. John Knowles died on November 29, 2001, in Fort Lauderdale, FL, after a short illness.
Critical Responses
Describing John Knowles, Contemporary Novelists wrote that he "is a fine craftsman, a fine stylist, alert to the infinite resources and nuances of language."
Knowles is best known for his first published novel, A Separate Peace. Writing Knowles' obituary for Entertainment Weekly, Karen Valby said "John Knowles was a god to generations of 10th-grade English classes" - students required to read the coming-of-age classic. One critic writing for the Saint James Guide to Young Adult Writers commented on the novel's popularity among educators - "it is a very useful text with which to teach students how a good book should be written." Critics praised A Separate Peace from the time of its publication. Knowles was hailed as a successor to J.D. Salinger. The novel won the first William Faulkner Award for notable first novel and received the 1960 Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Knowles later works, though, would never receive the acclaim and attention of A Separate Peace. Knowles himself once commented that A Separate Peace is "an albatross. Everything is compared to it unfavorably afterward."Contemporary Novelists best summed up the general critical response to Knowles's later works, commenting that the "later books display his writing grace but not the inner strength of A Separate Peace." His later novels suffer from implausible and flat characters - one critic called the characters in his second novel, Morning in Antibes, as "comatose." The later works, while well-crafted and filled with Knowles' excellent sense of place, simply lack the passion, the empathy, of the Gene and Phineas.
Works Published
Novels:
- A Separate Peace
- Morning in Antibes
- Indian Summer
- The Paragon
- Spreading Fires
- Vein of Riches
- Peace Breaks Out
- A Stolen Past
- The Private Life of Axie Reed
Short Stories:
- Phineas: Six Stories
Other:
- Double Vision: American Thoughts Abroad
- Backcasts: Memories and Recollections of Seventy Years as a Sportsman
Selected Bibliography
Bryant, H. B. Phineas's Pink Shirt in A Separate Peace. Notes on Contemporary Literature, November 1984. 14(5), 5-6.
Bryant, Hallman B. Symbolic Names in Knowles' A Separate Peace. Names: A Journal of Onomastics, Mar. 1986. 34(1), 83-88.
Crabbe, John K. On the Playing Fields of Devon. The English Journal, 1963. 52, 109-111.
Ellis, James. A Separate Peace: The Fall from Innocence. The English Journal, 1964. 53, 313-318.
Halio, Jay L. John Knowles's Short Novels. Studies in Short Fiction, 1964, 1, 107-112.
Kennedy, Ian. Dual Perspective Narrative and the Character of Phineas in A Separate Peace. Studies in Short Fiction, 1974. 11, 353-59.
McDonald, James L. The Novels of John Knowles. Arizona Quarterly, 1967. 23, 335-342.
McDonald, Walter R. Heroes Never Learn: Irony in A Separate Peace. Iowa English Bulletin Yearbook, 1972. 22(3), 33-36.
Mellard, James M. Counterpoint and 'Double Vision' in A Separate Peace. Studies in Short Fiction, 1967. 4, 127-134.
Mengeling, Marvin E. A Separate Peace: Meaning and Myth. The English Journal, 1969. 58, 1323-29.
Nora, M. A Comparison of Actual and Symbolic Landscape in A Separate Peace. Discourse, 1968. 11, 356-362.
Slethaug, Gordon E. The Play of the Double in A Separate Peace. Canadian Review of American Studies, Fall 1984. 15(3), 259-270.
Veitch, Colin R. The Devon School of Fiction by John Knowles. Arete: The Journal of Sport Literature, Spring 1986. 3(2), 101-113.
Ward, Hayden. The Arnoldian Situation in A Separate Peace. The Bulletin of the West Virginia Association of College English Teachers, 1974. 1(1), 2-10.
Wolfe, Peter. The Impact of Knowles's A Separate Peace. University Review, 1970. 36, 189-98.
Author Website
none available