John Knowles
1 book analyzed
Biography
John Knowles (1926–2001) attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire during World War II — one of the most elite prep schools in America. The Devon School in the novel is transparently Exeter. Like Gene, Knowles was a scholarship student from a less wealthy background surrounded by old-money New England families. Like Gene, he experienced the strange suspended summer of 1943 when the school ran a summer session to accelerate education for boys who would soon be drafted. Unlike Gene, he did not throw anyone from a tree — but the psychological terrain of jealousy, admiration, and guilt that the novel charts was, by his own account, autobiographical. He spent eleven years trying to write the book before getting the retrospective frame right.