Novelist John Knowles, whose 1960 book "A Separate Peace" became a modern classic for its sensitive evocation of adolescent conflict, died Thursday after a short illness at a convalescent home near Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 75.
Knowles' first and best-known work was based on his experiences at Phillips Exeter Academy, a well-known New Hampshire boarding school. Although he wrote eight other novels, none received the acclaim he earned with his debut work, which received the William Faulkner Foundation Prize and inspired a 1973 movie.
He did not seem bitter about the shadow "A Separate Peace" cast over his other novels, which include "Indian Summer" (1966) and "Peace Breaks Out" (1981). His avowedly autobiographical debut novel, he often acknowledged, made him famous and gave him financial security.
Decades after its original publication, "Separate Peace" was selling half a million copies a year and remains a staple of high school and college reading lists.
"Isn't that incredible?" he said in 1986. "And what touches me most, what pleases me most, is that people who are far removed from the world of prep schools love it."
One of the characters, Brinker, was based on Gore Vidal, who was a few years ahead of Knowles at Exeter in the mid-1940s. The two writers eventually became good friends.
"I have no memory of him when we were in school together," Vidal said Thursday from his home in Italy. "The next thing I know is he has published 'A Separate Peace,' in which I play a cameo part as sort of a snoop. . . . Then I got to know him, because I thought 'A Separate Peace' was a marvelous book. It was beyond anything he ever did later and anyone else had done of that sort, with the possible exception of [J.D. Salinger's] 'Catcher in the Rye.' "
When Knowles made his literary debut, one reviewer eagerly asked: "Is he the successor to Salinger for whom we have been waiting for so long?"
The parallels to Salinger's masterpiece, published a decade earlier, in 1951, were hard to ignore. Both dealt with the angst of prep school boys, and both were highly praised first novels.
Knowles was born in Fairmont, W. Va., where his father was in the coal business. His parents expected him to follow his older brother to a prep school in Pennsylvania, but Knowles--"just for the hell of it"--applied to Exeter. He cannily chose "Jane Eyre" as the topic of his essay for the school's English entrance exam and later reflected that the essay must have been good because his math and Latin scores were abysmal.
Encouraged to Write by Thornton Wilder
Entering Exeter in fall 1942, Knowles was an indifferent student at first, more concerned with getting by than getting ahead.
He graduated in 1945 and joined the war effort as part of the Army Air Force's Aviation Cadet Program. Several months later, he entered Yale University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1949.
In the 1950s, Knowles spent much of his time as a journalist, first as a freelancer in Europe and later as an associate editor of Holiday magazine.
He became friends with playwright Thornton Wilder, who encouraged him to write. Knowles began to work on "A Separate Peace," quitting journalism after its successful publication.
He drew heavily on his Exeter years because they were, he once said, "more crucial in my life than in the lives of most members of my class, and conceivably, than in the lives of almost anyone else who ever attended the school. It picked me up out of the hills of West Virginia, forced me to learn to study, tossed me into Yale . . . and a few years later inspired me to write . . ."
His pivotal time there began in summer 1943, when he took classes to make up for poor first-year grades. The teachers, or masters, were more relaxed and students felt more carefree, hanging from trees and frolicking on playing fields. Knowles kept company with a lively group of boys from other schools who, like him, needed to make up courses over the summer. It was, he said, "as happy a time as I ever had in my life."
Knowles and his friends formed a club called the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session, which initiated members by requiring them to jump from the branch of a tall tree into the river. The club became a central element of "Peace," as did one of its members, who inspired the character of Phineas, one of the novel's two protagonists.
"We really did have a club whose members jumped from the branch of a very high tree into the river as initiation," Knowles told the Exeter Bulletin several years ago. "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."
