A Separate Peace
A Separate Peace is John Knowles's 1959 novel, drawn loosely from his own years at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and now a fixture of American high-school reading lists. The book is told in the looking-back voice of Gene Forrester, who returns to the New Hampshire boarding school he calls Devon fifteen years after the events he is about to recount. The story proper opens in the summer of 1942, when Gene is sixteen and the war in Europe is going badly. He is a serious, conscientious scholarship student. His roommate Phineas, called Finny, is the school's gifted, ungovernably charming athlete, the one boy at Devon who seems unable to take rules or grades seriously. Across a single golden summer session, Finny invents a secret club called the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session, the boys jump from a high tree branch into the river, and Gene's slow, half-acknowledged jealousy of his friend builds toward the act on the same branch from which everything that follows will date.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about A Separate Peace
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
At a New England boys school during World War II, a careful student narrates his friendship with a fearless, charismatic athlete and the summer that changes both their lives.
A Separate Peace was written by John Knowles and published in 1959. It was Knowles's first novel and remains his most famous work. He drew on his own experience at Phillips Exeter Academy for the setting.
Yes. A Separate Peace has been one of the most frequently challenged books in American schools, primarily for language, sexual undertones, and themes some parents find inappropriate. It remains widely taught in high school English.
A Separate Peace is 196 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, A Separate Peace takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
A Separate Peace is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
A Separate Peace is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.