John Knowles
John Knowles was born in 1926 in Fairmont, West Virginia; at age 15, he became a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, a well-known boarding school in New Hampshire, not unlike Devon, the fictional school he writes about in A Separate Peace. He graduated from Exeter in 1945, but did not immediately proceed to college. Instead, he joined the war effort as part of the U.S. Army Air Force's Aviation Cadet Program, and became a student at Yale University after completing several months in the...