About the Book

A novel of unrest among 16-year-olds in a boy's school at theopening of WorldWar II.

Book Synopsis

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read.

An American classic and great bestseller for over thirty years, A Separate Peace is timeless in its description of adolescence during a period when the entire country was losing its innocence to World War II.

Set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.

Review Quotes

"I think it is the best-written, best-designed and most moving novel I have read in many years. Beginning with a tiny incident among ordinary boys, it ends by being as deep and as big as evil itself." --Aubrey Menen

"A quietly vital and cleanly written novel that moves, page by page, towards a most interesting target." --Truman Capote

"Is he the successor to Salinger for whom we have been waiting so long?" --Encounter

"A masterpiece." --National Review

"A model of restraint, deeply felt and beautifully written." --The Observer

"Mr. Knowles has something to say about youth and war that few contemporary novelists have attempted to say and none has said better." --Warren Miller

About the Author

John Knowles, who died in 2001, 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.