'Chicago, Illinois! Well, a little geography thrown in, eh, Roberts?.Knowles was born in Fairmont, West Virginia, the son of James M. I only stayed there a year because my mother married again and we moved to Chicago, Illinois.' My mother got a divorce from my father and I went to school in San Francisco. 'Well, I didn't go to a regular school till I was ten.

I'll tell you when I want you to-uh-halt.' Van Ness seemed to think that was funny, that 'halt.' Is that the kind of stuff you want, Mister?' My father and mother and I lived in a lot of places because he was in the Army and they transferred him. My father was a first lieutenant then and he's a major now. He asks Roberts to describe his family and his previous schools and then interrupts the boy's reply with a string of sardonic one-liners: Van Ness's office, the master swings his chair around, 'putting himself behind the large desk, like a damn judge' (136). Roberts's suspicion proves correct-the moment he steps into Mr.

It got so after a while, after going to so many schools, that you recognized the difference between being 'wanted in Somebody's office' and 'Somebody wants to see you.' If a master wanted to see you on some minor matter, it didn't always mean that you had to go to his office, but if it was serious, they always said, 'You're wanted in Somebody's office.' (135) In John O'Hara's short story 'Do You Like It Here?' (1939), a schoolboy named Humphrey Roberts is summoned to the dorm master's office and assumes that some kind of punishment is coming his way:

(2) Because Devon never comes into sharp relief, readers are free to fill the space Knowles leaves vacant with their most idealized notions about exclusive private academies. On the one hand, they weaken A Separate Peace by making its main setting remote and indistinct on the other, they help to explain the novel's enormous popularity. Knowles's efforts to turn the reader's attention away from the school have a paradoxical effect. Second, when the students in A Separate Peace suffer physical and emotional trauma, Knowles makes it clear that their injuries are self-inflicted and therefore Devon should not be held responsible. First of all, he keeps the Devon School and its routines offstage throughout the novel. (1) Instead of raising doubts about exclusive private schools, Knowles carefully shields his fictional academy from criticism. One rare exception is John Knowles's novel A Separate Peace (1959). Salinger, Richard Yates, and many other American writers have examined prep-school life in highly skeptical ways. before World War I, but when it comes to American school fiction Lucas is mistaken. Boarding-school literature, the British critic John Lucas argued recently, is often marked by 'Empire-era myopia' and 'tacit approval of a class-ridden, exclusionist society.' That may have been so in the U.

A stolen past john knowles