a separate peace setting essay

A Separate Peace John Knowles was born on September 16, 1926, in Fairmont, West Virginia. He lived there until he enrolled at Phillips Exeter Academy in 1941, where he was on the swimming team. He entered Yale University in 1945, continuing to compete as a swimmer in addition to editing the Yale Daily News and contributing short fiction to the Yale magazine Lit. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1949, and he worked briefly as a reporter for the Hartford Courant before joining the Curtis Publishing Company. At Curtis, he eventually became the associate editor of Holiday magazine. He spent much of his free time traveling extensively in Europe, the Near East, and the islands of the Aegean. During this time, he contributed many essays to travel journals and began to publish his short stories in popular national magazines. In 1960 A Separate Peace, his first novel, was published. It met with widespread critical acclaim and enthusiastic public response. More than nine million copies have been sold since its publication. The book won the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the William Faulkner Foundation Award (the forerunner of the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award), and it enabled Knowles to declare himself a “full-time writer.” He lived primarily on the French Riviera for the next eight years (although he undertook stints as a writer-in-residence at Princeton University and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and proceeded to publish Morning in Antibes (1962), Double Vision: American Thoughts Abroad (1964), Indian Summer (1966), and The Paragon (1972). Read the rest of this entry » A Separate Peace A Separate Peace was recognized immediately as an extremely sensitive account of a young man’s self-discovery through the process of maturation, and the passage of time has not lessened its universal appeal. John.
A Separate Peace: Moods and Settingphoto essay by Bradford Herzog edited by Thomas Hinkle inspired by John Knowles’ novelsource.
John Knowles' best-known work, A Separate Peace, remains one of the most popular post-war novels about adolescence. Although set in World War II, the novel explores a crucial cultural theme of the '50s, the motivations of a young man making a troubled transition from childhood to adulthood. Like the novels Lord of the Flies and Catcher in the Rye, as well as the film Rebel Without a Cause, A Separate Peace dramatizes the challenge of growing up to be a truly individual adult in a conformist world. World War II provides the novel's historical backdrop, a time when young men anticipated the enforced conformity and danger of war service. Fifteen million American men joined the military during World War II, with universal service accepting virtually all young men 18 and older who stood taller than five feet and weighed more than 105 pounds. About two-thirds (about ten million) of the men serving were drafted, and most of them were sent to the infantry, where they saw the worst of the war, and endured the highest casualty rate. The smaller group — still, about five million — enlisted, and so could choose the branch of service they would join. In Knowles' novel, the boys of the Devon School, educated, with families that are comfortable, if not wealthy, choose enlistment in relatively prestigious (and safer) training programs in preference to the draft. But, drafted or enlisted, the recruit had to look forward to the same period of basic training, when individual differences were supposed to be discarded to make way for the new group identity and goals. In Knowles' novel, this transition from a small prep school to military service looms as a big adjustment, one that proves too much for one Devon student. After the war was won, forms of military life seemed to continue in American culture. The commander of the troops in Europe, General Eisenhower, became president. American.
During the course of the summer I read two books, A Seperate Peace, by John Nowles, and And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie. They were totally opposite types of books but they were both pretty well written with lots of description and insight on what the characters were feeling. The setting in both books was pretty significant. In the first book, A Seperate Peace, the location, New Hampshire, was not nearly as important as the time. A Seperate Peace took place one summer during the early years of World War II, which affected everyones’s feeling and ways of thinking. The war made everything edgy and unsuspecting because anything could have happened to any one of them while the a war was going on. The war was on everyones mind and it affected many things in the book such as what the characters were doing in preperation for the possibility of going into war. In the second book, And Then There Were None, it is the complete opposite deal with the setting. In this book, the location was the most vital thing for the success and believability of this story. There is practically no way that the story would be even remotely credible if the setting had been elsewhere or with different weather conditions. A Seperate Peace was told in 3rd person limited omnicient, whereas And Then There Were None was told entirely in 1st person. In A Seperate Peace, the whole story was focused on what Gene, one of the main characters, was thinking and feeling. You didn’t really get much of what the other characters were feeling which I didn’t like. In And Then There Were None, the narrator tells the story and it’s interesting because you get insight on what’s going on in each of the character’s heads instead of just one or two of them. This format of writing is better because you tend to become more involved with the characters and you build a better understanding of all of the.
The setting of A Separate Peace – both time and place – are integral to the story and its meaning. As you'll read, well, everywhere in this guide, the backdrop of World War II establishes a series of parallels with the daily lives of the boys at Devon. War is both a military and personal term. (Gene fights a war against his own jealousy and fear, he identifies Finny as the enemy, and the boys all struggle against their personal demons.)As far as place is concerned, Devon is presented as an almost Edenic paradise. (Edenic = Eden-like. Get used to it, you'll see this word a lot in literary criticism.) The trees, the animals, the peaceful, lazy rivers – you get the picture. Notice how the war slowly creeps into the academy, starting with recruiters and ending with troops in Chapter Thirteen? Devon's initial isolation from the rest of the world is as important as its peaceful atmosphere. The boys are physically sequestered from adults and from war, but this barrier is an impermanent one. People who Shmooped this also Shmooped.