John Knowles was only 33 years old when A Separate Peace was             
published, in 1959, in England (see The Critics section at the end         
of this book for a good idea of how popular the book was there) and        
then, in 1960, in the United States. The book was an immediate and         
stunning success, receiving the William Faulkner Foundation Award          
and the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.     
  But John Knowles had begun writing seriously a decade before the         
success of A Separate Peace enabled him to abandon full-time               
employment. He was assistant editor for the Yale Alumni Magazine where     
he\'d attended college, he worked as a reporter and drama critic for        
the Hartford Courant, and then `````