![]() His books include Separate Peace, Peace Breaks Out, and The Paragon. A Separate Peace has captured as if in amber the experience of adolescence for millions of readers over four decades. John Knowles (19262001) was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University, as well as a recipient of the William Faulkner Award and the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. ![]() At once harrowing and luminous, brooding, and bittersweet. Set among a group of boys at a New England boarding school during World War II, it shines a light into the highest heights of beauty and the most profound depths of evil that young men are capable of reaching. Season after season, coming-of-age novels are still published, as they will always be, but succeeding generations discover for themselves why A Separate Peace brooks no competitors. In a way comparable perhaps oly to The Lord of the Flies, in England, this book looms over American literary imagination as both beacon and sentinel, enticing as many emulators by its extraordinary success as it discouraged by sheer magnificence of John Knowles's accomplishment. Salinger's A Catcher in the Rye and it would be equally impossible to explore the genre in a tragic vein without taking account of John Knowles's A Separate Peace. ![]() ![]() It would be inconceivable for an American author to write a coming-of-age novel in a comedic vein without reckoning with J. ![]()
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