John Knowles was an American novelist. He is best known for his first published novel A Separate Peace. Most of his works are psychological analyses of characters who are caught in the clash between the wild and the pragmatic aspect of their personalities.
In general, John Knowles does not write about his home territory. He writes about New England or Europe as a whole. In only one novel, Vein of Riches, and that is not his best novel, he has talked about West Virginia that is his childhood home.
His fictional world is a refined and naturalized one. It is composed of many people from many parts of the world. In this way, his fictional world is not provincial in attitudes or interests.
Knowles is a professional writer whose work is consistently of high quality. He has such a fine style. He is completely aware of the infinite resources and subtle differences in meaning, opinion, or attitude in the language.
Despite all these qualities, Knowles is a person who loves to live around the world. He is a rootless man. He is in search of extracting moral excellence from rootlessness.
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 an expert in appreciating different cultures but he is the master of none. Perhaps, he is the believer of the subculture of the New England pedagogy.
One drawback of this very cosmopolitanism in Knowles’ personality is the feeling of estrangement that Knowles feels from his fictional world. As an experienced person of many cultures, he finds this trait advantageous when he writes graceful travel essays for Holiday magazine.
On the contrary, he finds it a disadvantage when he tries to create a thoroughly convincing fictional character for Vein of Riches.
A Short Biography of John Knowles
John Knowles was born in Fairmont, West Virginia on September 16, 1926. His father’s name was James M. Knowles who was a purchasing agent from Lowell, Massachusetts. His mother’s name was Mary Beatrice Shea Knowles who belonged to Concord, New Hampshire. Knowles’ father was vice president of a coal company who was able to earn enough income to give a comfortable living to his family.
Knowles went to St. Peter’s High School in Fairmont, West Virginia, between 1938 and 1940. At the age of fifteen, he left Fairmont and continued studies at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. It was an elite prep school.
Knowles discovered that Exeter is both socially and academically challenging. His experiences in Exeter later inspired at least two of his later works: A Separate Peace (1959) and Peace Breaks Out (1981). He graduated in 1947.
After spending time at Phillips Exeter, Knowles spent eight months while serving in the U.S. Army Air Forces at the end of World War II.
Knowles received an academic degree from Yale University as a member of the class of 1949. From Yale, Knowles received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1949.
Jobs and Literary Career of John Knowles
While John Knowles was still at Yale University, he wrote stories for campus humor magazine “The Yale Record.” He served as a member of the Yale Daily News during his second-year undergraduate, junior, and senior years.
He was notably the editorial secretary when he was in his senior year. He was a record-holding university swimmer as well while he was in his sophomore year.
After graduating from college, Knowles served the Hartford Courant as a reporter. From time to time, he wrote theater evaluations for the newspaper as well. By 1952, Knowles was a freelance writer. By that time, he had many articles published in Holiday magazine. Later on, he also became an associate editor in Holiday magazine.
After receiving encouragement from Thornton Wilder, Knowles wrote A Separate Peace. It gave him the financial freedom to devote himself completely to writing fiction.
In an early writing career, Knowles wrote a novel that was never published. He also wrote a short story that appeared in a small fiction magazine. He started to try out the new material so it would inspire the early chapters of A Separate Peace with the short story “Phineas,” which was published in Cosmopolitan in 1956.
When Knowles put forward his completed novel to American publishers, the manuscript was rejected. At last, Knowles found a British publisher, Secker, and Warburg, for submitting and processing his novel.
Consequently, A Separate Peace was published in 1959. It quickly earned the praise of British critics as well. During the spring of 1960, when the New York edition came out, American reviewers were also praising the novel vociferously.
The success of the novel freed Knowles to write further and expand his understanding through travel. As a result, his next two books were Morning in Antibes (novel, 1962) and Double Vision: American Thoughts from Abroad (1964).
The second book is a collection of travel essays. Knowles took inspiration for writing this book from wanderings on the Riviera and in the Middle East.
Themes in the Books by John Knowles
The themes of John Knowles’ books are more social and broad in scope. They are relatable and understandable because they belong to this world. They show the reality that is hidden under layers.
The most acclaimed novel by John Knowles is A Separate Peace. It tells the story of two competitive friends who are students at New England Preparatory school during World War II. Because of being an enduring classic, the novel became part of the syllabus of high-school English classes throughout the United States.
Peace Breaks Out (1981) is the sequel of A Separate Peace. It also discusses student rivalry in the same setting. However, it is discussed from the perspective of a troubled young teacher who has recently come back from World War II. In this way, Knowles aims to discuss human relationships and the effects of outside chaotic circumstances on them.
In Indian Summer (1966), Knowles again discussed the theme of boyhood friendships that he had already delved into in A Separate Peace. There is a good deal of cultural primitivism in this book. However, the characters are unconvincing.
For this reason, critics declared their dissatisfaction because their expectations were not realized in this book as they were in Knowles’ first and greatest work.
Knowles discovered a new subject and tone in Spreading Fires (1974). It is a gothic thriller set on the Riviera. It is a concise and succinct novel of abasement and homosexual modification set in the south of France. The novel deals with madness, potential madness, and the low life of the seemingly upper-class people.
Similarly, he explored the effects of past experiences on the present in A Stolen Past (1983) as well as The Private Life of Axie Reed (1986).
A Vein of Riches (1978) is Knowles’ historical novel about coal mining. It is the study of the great coal boom in a West Virginia town between 1910 and 1924. It has reflection upon his childhood in West Virginia.
One of the central themes of this American fiction is money versus land. It is a pleasant novel. However, Knowles has not given thorough attention to its characters. It shows that coal does not interest Knowles as much as New England prep school life does.
Returning to New England themes, Knowles set The Paragon (1971) at Yale University while coming back to his New England Themes. Eventually, he came back to the fictional Devon School in Peace Breaks Out (1981).
All critics have praised the author’s work and his much relatable and social themes. However, they still consider and agree that the best novel written by Knowles was his first, A Separate Peace.
Writing Style and Beliefs of John Knowles
Knowles appreciated many authors and their different writing styles. He praised academic classics to experimental literature. It suggests that he was an open-minded person who embraced this trait in his university class.
There is no specific writing style of Knowles, yet he has a certain uniqueness that helps readers recognize his work. There are many secrets of his creative writing that he talked about in an interview in the 1990s.
Unconscious Use of Symbols
According to Knowles, a writer must never intentionally put symbolic meanings in their work. He thought that those writers who purposely insert symbolism into writing are misguided. In other words, symbolism must come naturally in a piece of writing. For this reason, he has only put two conscious symbols in A Separate Peace.
In his work, the symbols emerge from his subconscious and enter into his work because his mind works symbolically. The characters in his novels do everything symbolically. They dress up to show something about themselves. Every character goes after a thing not because of its apparent reason but because of its symbolic place in the scheme of things.
In this way, in the case of Knowles, he writes truly and deep enough and this is how symbols emerge originally. Also, through this technique, he suggests that people must trust their subconscious.
Freeing the Imagination
Knowles’ works are true and deep. He said that there is a technique to approach writing to help make this happen. The technique is that Knowles never became too willful or determined whenever he sat down to write. He used the trick of freeing his imagination so that it will in return help his imagination come into play and make his writing better.
In A Separate Peace, the novel is narrated from the first-person point of view. Through this style, Knowles conveys the message that imagination has no limits. Also, a story can be better told by the person who is experiencing it himself. For this reason, the story is told by a middle-aged man who looks back on a part of his childhood.
Keeping his Personality out of his creations
According to critics, some of Knowles’ works are such that the story and sense of play are so strong that it seems like the story could have taken place without the author himself.
For example, A Separate Peace is about Knowles’ personal experiences. However, the writers do not know about it unless they come to know through another source.
In this way, Knowles tried to be unobtrusive. Whenever the readers read his work, they do not think about him, his style, personality, or anything. Therefore, it can be said that Knowles has a style of having no style.
He believed that a real artist is forgotten by the readers when his work is read because of his work because they are enthralled by what is transpiring by his characters and story.
Writing for Himself
After the success of A Separate Peace, critics expected that his following works would be great as well. However, they never found his other writing as great as the first one. Despite all negative criticism, Knowles never stopped writing because he was writing for himself, his pleasure, and his satisfaction.
Inspiration for His Work
Many of Knowles’s books are heavily fictionalized but they come from his direct experience. He was raised in West Virginia. He then lived in New England. Additionally, he traveled a lot. All these things helped in becoming a worth-reading writer.
For example, A Vein of Riches (1978) is about the childhood of Knowles in West Virginia. He met dramatic experiences and people of complex personalities. They lent themselves to become characters in his fiction work.
He never went for these materials purposely. He believed that what he is doing is literature and not journalism. Therefore, the search for inspiration in literature is self-defeating. For this reason, he just followed his interests and his life as it unfolded naturally. He did not travel to get some material for writing.
He said that he traveled because he was eager to see the world and when he went to the Mediterranean, he found some things there to write about. This is why Knowles did not go out to find literature but it happened naturally.
Never Stopped Writing
Knowles started writing at the age of twelve. When he was at Exeter, he wrote a lot. Later on, he said that he remembered none of them. He also wrote at Yale but he believes but his art flowered when he was in his teenage years. He also believed that his art sort of went underground when he got into his early twenties. He worked and studied at that time.
In his late twenties, his art re-emerged in full bloom. That was when he produced work like A Separate Peace.
Never Planning Plot for a Novel in Advance
Knowles was asked in an interview if he figures out everything in the plot in advance. He answered that he never does it. Knowles wrote the way he felt. This is why his work is organic. Sometimes, later events grow out of earlier events.
He also said that he always has a general idea about the thrust of a book but he never knows how it will work. It suggests that when he started to write A Separate Peace, he did not know what its end would be.
The Rule is There is no Rule
There is no specific style or format of Knowles’s writing. He was a rootless man and for this reason, he never attached to any standard or rule in his writing. He said that there is no fixed rule in writing. He did not even believe in using recognizable language.
Just like James Joyce made his language for Finnegan’s Wake and George Orwell wrote about pigs in Animal Farm, Knowles has a different style and different language for each of his characters.
Awards
John Knowles won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He also received the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Death
John Knowles died on November 29, 2001, at the age of Seventy-five in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, U.S.