Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.
"John Knowles" was an American novelist best known for A Separate Peace (1959). He died in 2001 at the age of 75.
If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous novelists! More John Knowles on Wikipedia.Well, you know, there was the most enormous youth rebellion during the '30s. There was the Peace Pledge Union, which supposedly involved the cream of British youth. They thought wars were ridiculous and said just what everybody says today. They said they would not fight in any war.
Teenagers today are more free to be themselves and to accept themselves.
Looking back, I think we were all quite mature, surprisingly responsible. In earlier wars, boys of our age had just gone off to raise hell or enlist or both, but we stayed dutifully at our desks doing tomorrow's homework.
The novel has one peculiarity for a school novel: It never attacks the place; it isn't an expose; it doesn't show sadistic masters or depraved students, or use any of the other school-novel sensationalistic cliches. That's because I didn't experience things like that there.
Exeter was, I suspect, more crucial in my life than in the lives of most members of my class, and conceivably, than in the lives of almost anyone else who ever attended the school.
We really did have a club whose members jumped from the branch of a very high tree into the river as initiation.
The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.
As a kid from a border state, I found the New Hampshire winter breathtakingly cold - for a while I didn't think I could breathe there at all - but I survived to return for the summer session of 1943.
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