Biography of john knowles separate peace book

John Knowles won both critical and popular success with his first novel, A Separate Peace. In the 40 years since its publication, the novel has become a classic for both young adults and adult readers. Although he has written eight other novels, including Peace Breaks Out, which shares the prep school setting of the earlier novel, Knowles has not yet repeated the success of his first work.

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Knowles was born in , in Fairmont, West Virginia. He spent his childhood in the small town of a coal-mining region, attending public schools. Knowles found Exeter both socially and academically challenging, and his experiences there inspired at least two of his later works: A Separate Peace and Peace Breaks Out , in which Exeter is reconceived as Devon School.

In the fall of , Knowles entered Yale University to study English. After serving for eight months in the U. After graduating from college, Knowles worked as a reporter for the Hartford Courant and occasionally wrote theater reviews for the newspaper. By , he was a freelance writer, with several articles published in Holiday magazine, where he became an associate editor.

The success of A Separate Peace gave Knowles the financial freedom to devote himself entirely to writing fiction. Early in his career, Knowles wrote a novel that was never published and a short story that appeared in a small fiction magazine.

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Knowles submitted his completed novel to American publishers, but the manuscript was rejected. Knowles found a British publisher, Secker and Warburg, for his work. A Separate Peace appeared in and quickly earned the praise of British reviewers. By the spring of , when the New York edition came out, American critics were acclaiming the novel as well.

The success of the novel freed Knowles to write and to travel.