Name: ______

Critical Responses to A Separate Peace

Describing John Knowles, Contemporary Novelists wrote that he "is a fine craftsman, a fine stylist, alert to the infinite resources and nuances of language."
Knowles is best known for his first published novel, A Separate Peace. Writing Knowles' obituary for Entertainment Weekly, Karen Valby said "John Knowles was a god to generations of 10th-grade English classes" - students required to read the coming-of-age classic. One critic writing for the Saint James Guide to Young Adult Writers commented on the novel's popularity among educators - "it is a very useful text with which to teach students how a good book should be written." Critics praised A Separate Peace from the time of its publication. Knowles was hailed as a successor to J.D. Salinger. The novel won the first William Faulkner Award for notable first novel and received the 1960 Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Knowles later works, though, would never receive the acclaim and attention of A Separate Peace. Knowles himself once commented that A Separate Peace is "an albatross. Everything is compared to it unfavorably afterward."

Contemporary Novelists best summed up the general critical response to Knowles's later works, commenting that the "later books display his writing grace but not the inner strength of A Separate Peace." His later novels suffer from implausible and flat characters - one critic called the characters in his second novel, Morning in Antibes, as "comatose." The later works, while well-crafted and filled with Knowles' excellent sense of place, simply lack the passion, the empathy, of the Gene and Phineas.

Your Response

1.  Do you think that A Separate Peace should continue to be taught to sophomore students? Why or why not?

2.  When examining the major themes of the book, which themes do you think are still relevant in today’s society? Which themes are outdated and no longer apply?

Relevant Themes / Outdated Themes

3.  What was your favorite scene in this text? What was you least favorite?

Favorite Scene / Least Favorite Scene

4.  Do you think the characters from the text are universal characters (are there characters like this in every society)?

Character / Universal? / Why?
Gene
Finny
Brinker
Leper