A Separate Peace: Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

MOST SOCIALLY PRESTIGIOUS AMERICAN BOARDING SCHOOLS School Location 1. Choate School Wallingford, Connecticut 2. Deerfield Academy Deerfield, Massachusetts 3. Episcopal High School Alexandria, Virginia 4. Groton School Groton, Massachusetts 5. Hill School Pottstown, Pennsylvania 6. Hotchkiss School Lakeville, Connecticut 7. Kent School Kent, Connecticut 8. Lawrenceville School Lawrenceville, New Jersey 9. Middlesex School Concord, Massachusetts 10. Phillips Academy Andover, Massachusetts 11. Phillips Exeter Academy Exeter, New Hampshire 12. St. George's School Newport, Rhode Island 13. St. Mark's School Southborough, Massachusetts 14. St Paul's School Concord, New Hampshire 15. Taft School Watertown, Connecticut 16. Woodberry Forest School Woodberry Forest, Virginia   (Adapted from Baltzell, p. 306)

by John Knowles

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Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

The postwar boom and prosperity. While many European nations were financially shattered following the war years, the American economy thrived for the first time since the 1920s. The Great Depression of the 1930s had weakened the nation's financial health considerably. Following the war, however, and throughout the 1950s the economic indicators showed proof of an affluent new age.

A Separate Peace was first published in 1956. The relative prosperity of the decade in which the novel was written is expressed by Gene in the opening pages of A Separate Peace. Upon returning to his old school fifteen years after graduation he remarks on how much more prosperous the school looked at this point than it had when he was a student.


It seemed more sedate than I remembered it, more perpendicular and straight-laced, with narrower windows and shinier woodwork, as though a coat of varnish had been put over everything for preservation. But, of course, fifteen years before there had been a war going on. Perhaps the school wasn't as well kept up in those days; perhaps varnish, along with everything else, had gone to the war.

(A Separate Peace, p. 6)


Despite the involvement of U.S. military forces in yet another conflict abroad-the war in Korea in the early 1950s-the period remained one of relative affluence and stability. This is especially true when compared to the scarcity, economic hardship, and political instability that accompanied the World War II years.

A materialistic culture. Although the 1950s proved to be a thriving financial era for the United States, there were some who warned such prosperity would add shallowness to the American character. From several different sectors of society, people complained that decent human values had been replaced by an empty concern for riches and possessions. According to some historians, the materialism of the time was reinforced by the tendency of the members of society to conform to one style of behavior. The 1950s is often regarded as a "great age of conformity, when members of all social groups learned to emulate those around them rather than strike out on their own" (Nash, p. 934).

Writers of the decade criticized this rampant conformity and consumerism in the 1950s. According to one historian, the decade's most popular novel for young people was J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951; also covered in Literature and Its Times) because of its assault on the "phoniness, and hypocrisy of adult life" (O'Neill, p. 239). Knowles was, in fact, compared to Salinger, with at least one reviewer asking if Knowles was the successor to the groundbreaking author of Catcher in the Rye.

Reviews. A Separate Peace was published in the United States and in England in 1959. It won high praise in both countries and received several prestigious literary prizes, including the Faulkner Foundation Award. The novel was lauded as a work of distinction in English journals such as the Times Literary Supplement and the Manchester Guardian. In the New York Times Book Review, Harding Le May praised both its style as well as its content:


[A Separate Peace is] a consistently admirable exercise in the craft of fiction-disciplined, precise, witty.... The theme, that of the corroding flaw in friendship between young males, has engaged the talents of such disparate writers as Thomas Mann, William Maxwell and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Having chosen a theme which echoes in every sensitive man's experience, Mr. Knowles chooses further to isolate it from the mainstream of life, almost as if he were examining one case of a disease which rages in an epidemic throughout the rest of the world.

(Le May in Stine, p. 246)