John Knowles' best-known work, A Separate Peace, remains one of the most popular post-war novels about adolescence. Although set in World War II, the novel explores a crucial cultural theme of the '50s, the motivations of a young man making a troubled transition from childhood to adulthood. Like the novels Lord of the Flies and Catcher in the Rye, as well as the film Rebel Without a Cause, A Separate Peace dramatizes the challenge of growing up to be a truly individual adult in a conformist world.
World War II provides the novel's historical backdrop, a time when young men anticipated the enforced conformity and danger of war service. Fifteen million American men joined the military during World War II, with universal service accepting virtually all young men 18 and older who stood taller than five feet and weighed more than 105 pounds.
About two-thirds (about ten million) of the men serving were drafted, and most of them were sent to the infantry, where they saw the worst of the war, and endured the highest casualty rate. The smaller group — still, about five million — enlisted, and so could choose the branch of service they would join. In Knowles' novel, the boys of the Devon School, educated, with families that are comfortable, if not wealthy, choose enlistment in relatively prestigious (and safer) training programs in preference to the draft.
But, drafted or enlisted, the recruit had to look forward to the same period of basic training, when individual differences were supposed to be discarded to make way for the new group identity and goals. In Knowles' novel, this transition from a small prep school to military service looms as a big adjustment, one that proves too much for one Devon student.
After the war was won, forms of military life seemed to continue in American culture. The commander of the troops in Europe, General Eisenhower, became president. American industries designed their corporate structures along military lines. Dress codes flourished, and army regulation haircuts for men were popular even with younger people. Social conformity was the rule, and individuality raised suspicion.
