But Finney's death is preceded by Gene's reconciliation with him, a redemptive act which to some degree assuages his feeling of guilt. Gene, beset by a love-hate attitude toward Finney, causes Finney to suffer a serious injury and still later is the putative cause of his death from a second injury. It is a prep school novel about Gene Forrester and his close friend, Finney, and the studied set of ambiguities and ambivalences arising from the intense and complex relationship between the two. He finds it a disadvantage when he wishes to create for Vein of Riches a thoroughly credible fictional character.Ī Separate Peace, his first novel, is also by far his most important. As a veteran of many cultures he finds this trait an advantage when he writes graceful travel essays for Holiday magazine. One defect of this very cosmopolitanism is the feeling of alienation that Knowles feels from his fictional world. He is a connoisseur of different cultures but master of none -or perhaps of one only, the sub-culture of the New England prep school. 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 a fine craftsman, a fine stylist, alert to the infinite resources and nuances of language. His fictional world is a cultivated, cosmopolitan, somewhat jaded world.
Only one novel, Vein of Riches, and that not his best, is about West Virginia, his childhood home. John Knowles writes, in general, not about his home turf but about New England or Europe. Fowlerville, Michigan, Wilderness Adventure, 1993.* Manuscript Collections:īeinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.* * * New York, Macmillan, and London, Secker and Warburg, 1964.īackcasts: Memories and Recollections of Seventy Years as a Sportsman. Otherĭouble Vision: American Thoughts Abroad. New York, Holt Rinehart, 1983 London, Constable, 1984. New York, Holt Rinehart, 1981.Ī Stolen Past. New York, Random House, and London, Secker andWarburg, 1966. New York, Macmillan, and London, Secker and Warburg, 1962. London, Secker and Warburg, 1959 New York, Macmillan, 1960 edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom, Philadelphia, Chelsea House, 1999. Address: c/o Penguin Putnam, 405 Murray Hill Parkway, East Rutherford, New Jersey 07073-2136, U.S.A. Awards: Rosenthal Foundation award, 1961 Faulkner Foundation award, 1961 National Association of Independent Schools award, 1961. Writer-in-residence, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1963-64, and Princeton University, New Jersey, 1968-69. Career: Reporter, Hartford Courant, Connecticut, 1950-52 freelance writer, 1952-56 associate editor, Holiday magazine, Philadelphia, 1956-60.
Education: Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, graduated 1945 Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, B.A. Born: Fairmont, West Virginia, 16 September 1926.
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