At Slate Stephen Metcalf rereads John Knowles’s A Separate Peace for its fiftieth anniversary.
Rereading A Separate Peace for the first time in 30 years, I was surprised to discover its setting is the least anachronistic thing about it. A Separate Peace takes place at a New Hampshire prep school modeled not at all loosely on Exeter, where Knowles had been a student in the ’40s. Movies like Dead Poets Society, about boys knuckling under to a rheumatic American upper class and its to-the-hounds! institutions, derive from a lazy reading of A Separate Peace. A Separate Peace derives, for better and worse, from the thing itself.
