Nationality: American.
Born: Fairmont, West Virginia, 1926.
Education: Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, graduated 1945; Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, B.A. 1949.
Career: Reporter, Hartford
Courant, Connecticut, 1950-52; freelance writer, 1952-56; associate editor,
Holiday magazine, Philadelphia, 1956-60. Writer-in-residence, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1963-64, and Princeton University, New Jersey, 1968-69.
Awards: Rosenthal Foundation award, 1961; Faulkner Foundation award, 1961; National Association of Independent Schools award, 1961.
John Knowles writes, in general, not about his home turf but about New England or Europe. Only one novel, Vein of Riches, and that not his best, is about West Virginia, his childhood home. His fictional world is a cultivated, cosmopolitan, somewhat jaded world. He is a fine craftsman, a fine stylist, alert to the infinite resources and nuances of language. Yet, as he says, he is one of the live-around-the-world people, rootless, nomadic, and making a virtue of that rootlessness. He is a connoisseur of different cultures but master of none—or perhaps of one only, the sub-culture of the New England prep school. One defect of this very cosmopolitanism is the feeling of alienation that Knowles feels from his fictional world. As a veteran of many cultures he finds this trait an advantage when he writes graceful travel essays for Holiday magazine. He finds it a disadvantage when he wishes to create for Vein of Riches a thoroughly credible fictional character.
A Separate Peace, his first novel, is also by far his most important. It is a prep school novel about Gene Forrester and his close friend, Finney, and the studied set of ambiguities and ambivalences arising from the intense and complex relationship between the two. Gene, beset by a love-hate attitude toward Finney, causes Finney to suffer a serious injury and still later is the putative cause of his death from a second injury. But Finney's death is preceded by Gene's reconciliation with him, a redemptive act which to some degree assuages his feeling of guilt. Thus, the novel recounts Gene's initiation into manhood and into both worldly and moral maturity. Fifteen years after Finney's death, Gene returns to Devon to conclude the novel by thinking—"Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence." What does endure is the extraordinary popularity of this novel with prep school and college students.
Knowles's later books display his writing grace but not the inner strength of A Separate Peace. His second novel, Morning in Antibes, has a pot-pourri of comatose characters revolving about the deracinated Nicolas Petrovich Bodine in a kind of latter day The Sun Also Rises; it lacks, however, the Hemingway tone, atmosphere, and taut dialogue. The people are phony and maybe the novel is too. The long passivity of Nick makes him seem to move under water. The novel fails in characterization.
