A Study Guide for John Knowles's "Peace Breaks Out"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for John Knowles's "Peace Breaks Out", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781410393487

Book preview

18

Peace Breaks Out

John Knowles

1981

Introduction

John Knowles is best known for his 1959 young-adult novel A Separate Peace. His 1981 Peace Breaks Out shares that novel's setting at the fictional Devon Academy, an elite preparatory school, and the plot of A Separate Peace is briefly recalled in the more recent work. However, Peace Breaks Out is intensely political, exploring the psychological and social conditions that could potentially fuel fascism in the United States. He is particularly concerned with the Red scare of the 1950s which, by the 1980s, was viewed as a dangerous example of right-wing extremism in American political life. It is an expansion of the themes of his short story A Turn with the Sun, also set at Devon, which analyzed the psychological genesis of fascism.

Author Biography

Knowles was born on September 16, 1926, in Fairmont, West Virginia. His family came from Lowell, Massachusetts, but they moved to West Virginia, where his father, James, became a coal company executive. Knowles attended the Oyster-Bay High School in New York, but in 1942 he moved to boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire (where he became acquainted with the prominent novelist Gore Vidal). He graduated in 1945 and served briefly in the US Army Air Corps. After the war, he attended Yale University, where he worked on the Yale Daily News, becoming the editorial secretary in his senior year (1948–1949). He began work as the European correspondent for the Hartford Courant. Knowles became an associate editor at the travel magazine Holiday in 1957.

The prominent playwright Thornton Wilder took an interest in Knowles's writing and encouraged him to begin his first novel, A Separate Peace, published in 1959 in England and in 1960 in the United States. (Peace Breaks Out is dedicated to Wilder's memory.) It became a phenomenally successful book after it was categorized within the emerging genre of young-adult literature and became standard reading in American high schools. Set at Devon (a fictionalized Exeter) during World War II, it concerns a boy, Gene, who deliberately injures his classmate and friend, Phineas, although Gene himself does not understand his motivations for this, much less foresee the long-term consequence of that act, Phineas's death. The novel garnered the William Faulkner Foundation Award (for best new writer) and the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. A Separate Peace was filmed in 1982.

The mystery about the accident was unresolved even at the time of Knowles's death, when his brother-in-law Bob Maxwell (as quoted in his obituary), told reporters, "John used to say he