John knowles author biography for book

Novels

A Separate Peace. London, Secker and Warburg, 1959; New York, Macmillan, 1960; edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom, Philadelphia, Chelsea House, 1999.

Morning in Antibes. New York, Macmillan, and London, Secker and Warburg, 1962.

Indian Summer. New York, Random House, and London, Secker andWarburg, 1966.

The Paragon. New York, Random House, 1971.

Spreading Fires. New York, Random House, 1974.

Vein of Riches. Boston, Little Brown, 1978.

Peace Breaks Out. New York, Holt Rinehart, 1981.

A Stolen Past. New York, Holt Rinehart, 1983; London, Constable, 1984.

The Private Life of Axie Reed. New York, Dutton, 1986.

Short Stories

Phineas: Six Stories. New York, Random House, 1968.

Other

Double Vision: American Thoughts Abroad. New York, Macmillan, and London, Secker and Warburg, 1964.

Backcasts: Memories and Recollections of Seventy Years as a Sportsman. Fowlerville, Michigan, Wilderness Adventure, 1993.

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Manuscript Collections:

Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

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John Knowles writes, in general, not about his home turf but about New England or Europe.

Yet, as he says, he is one of the live-around-the-world people, rootless, nomadic, and making a virtue of that rootlessness. 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.

Andragogy encourages collaboration, practical application, and drawing on learners' experiences.

Why is Knowles' theory important for teachers?

Knowles' theory helps teachers design lessons that engage adult learners by connecting content to their personal experiences and needs. Many readers will find the excessive hypocrisy of Wexford, the ringleader of the torturers, a little unrealistic.

But it has all been done before in his earlier and better novel and thus lacks freshness and spontaneity. At 15, he left Fairmont for Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite prep school in New Hampshire. He is a fine craftsman, a fine stylist, alert to the infinite resources and nuances of language. He was also a record-holding champion varsity swimmer.

He spent his childhood in the small town of a coal-mining region, attending public schools. This leads not to Gene’s own self-destruction, but that of his best friend Finny, whom he finally realizes that he was never at war with at all. He explored the effects of the past on the present in A Stolen Past (1983) and The Private Life of Axie Reed (1986).

"We need to be nomadic and uprooted today," he maintains. After serving for eight months in the U.S. Army Air Corps, Knowles returned to Yale, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1949.

Jobs and Literary Writing

After graduating from college, Knowles worked as a reporter for the Hartford Courant and occasionally wrote theater reviews for the newspaper.

Again, as in A Separate Peace, there is a legacy of guilt suffered by the four survivors. Perhaps because we miss the "yellow cocktail music" of Gatsby, perhaps because the characters remain partially developed. Cleet's conviction, which he shares with T.S. Eliot's Sweeney, is that each man needs to do someone in. Knowles shows a house, a family, and an industry, and the interactions of the three; he employs one of the central themes of American fiction, money versus land.

So he is and so are the characters in his books.