Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
A separate peace: moods & setting; a photographic essay with excerpts from the novel, by John Knowles '45 [Published Date: no date listed, circa 1970]. Paper covers, staple bound, [32] pp (unpaginated). Black and white photography throughout. Excerpts from A Separate Peace by John Knowles, by permission of The Macmillan Company. Other text and photographs Copyright of The Trustees of The Phillips Exeter Academy.
In good condition. Black and white pictorial paper covers have a few tiny nicks to edges and light bumping and creasing to edges. light overall scuffing to covers as well with a bit of the color scuffed off along edges and spine. Binding tight (staple bound).Interior pages clean and unmarked. NOT Ex-Library. [From T. HInkle's introduction] Fiction can best be illustrated by the reader's imagination, and suggestions as to the "correct" picture are disconcerting and often disappointing. And yet, a writer's work begins, somehow, in the time and place of his own experience, and for John Knowles these were the final years of the Second World War, at the Phillips Exeter Academy. It was that experience which he transformed into A Separate Peace, published fifteen years after his graduation. I have not set out to reconstruct the Exeter scene of 1945. Nearly all of these pictures are recent [1970], with exceptions in the case of an important building or room which has been removed or remodeled. Although there is much new construction taking place on the campus, many of the old buildings have not been changed.To schoolboys of today that war has become ancient history, but the encroachments of war upon young men's lives remains essentially the same. And what makes A Separate Peace impressive is the way it reaches into the existence of boys at school, an intense, competitive, often lonely existence, from which adults are largely excluded. Because this basis of living does not change, the boys pictured here are, with allowances for fashion, like those of any time. These photographs are not meant to dispel the mystery of their unique world, any more than facts about an author can rob a novel of its art. Perhaps they will add new subjects for speculation.