John Knowles

John Knowles (; September 16, 1926 – November 29, 2001) was an American novelist best known for A Separate Peace.

Biography Knowles was born on September 16, 1926, in Fairmont, West Virginia, the son of James M. Knowles, a purchasing agent from Lowell, Massachusetts, and Mary Beatrice Shea Knowles from Concord, New Hampshire. His father was a coal company executive, which earned an income that afforded the family a comfortable living. As a youth, Knowles would remark that he could write just as well as the stories from The Saturday Evening Post.

Knowles attended St. Peter's High School in Fairmont from 1938 to 1940, before he continued at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, and graduated in 1945. Following his time at Phillips Exeter, Knowles spent eight months serving in the US Army Air Forces at the end of World War II.

Knowles graduated from Yale University as a member of the class of 1949. At Yale, Knowles contributed stories to campus humor magazine The Yale Record and served on the board of the Yale Daily News during his sophomore, junior, and senior years, notably as editorial secretary during his senior year. He was a record-holding varsity swimmer during his sophomore year.

Early in his career, Knowles wrote for the Hartford Courant and was assistant editor for Holiday magazine. With encouragement from Thornton Wilder, he concurrently began writing novels.

Knowles died on November 29, 2001, near Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The secondary character Finny (Phineas) is the friend of the main character Gene. Knowles has stated that he modeled Finny on David Hackett from Milton Academy, whom he met when both attended a summer session at Phillips Exeter Academy. Hackett was a friend of Robert F. Kennedy under whom he later served in the US Justice Department. A student, Phineas Sprague, lived in the same dormitory as Knowles during the summer session of 1943 and may have inspired the character's name.

In his memoir Palimpsest, Gore Vidal acknowledged that he and Knowles simultaneously attended Phillips Exeter Academy, though Vidal was two years ahead of Knowles. Vidal stated that Knowles told him the character Brinker was based on him. "We have been friends for many years now," Vidal said, "and I admire the novel that he based on our school days, A Separate Peace."

Awards Knowles won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Selected works "A Turn with the Sun" (short story), Story: The Magazine of the Short Story, Number 4, 1953 "Phineas" (short story), Cosmopolitan, May, 1956 A Separate Peace (novel), London, Secker & Warburg, 1959; New York, Macmillan Co., 1960 Morning in Antibes (novel), New York, Macmillan, 1962 Double Vision; American Thoughts Abroad, New York, Macmillan, 1964 Indian Summer, New York, Random House, 1966 Phineas. Six Stories, New York, Random House, 1968 The Paragon (novel), New York, Random House, 1971 "Rapture of the Deep" (short story), 1972 Spreading Fires, New York, Random House, 1974 A Vein of Riches, Boston, Little Brown, 1978 Peace Breaks Out (novel), New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981 A Stolen Past, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983 The Private Life of Axie Reed, New York : John Knowles, 1986 A Special Time, A Special Place, Exeter Bulletin, 1995 (autobiographical note on internet)