John Knowles graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive New Hampshire prep school, in 1945. A Separate Peace grew largely out of his experiences at Exeter. Like his character Gene Forrester, Knowles was also a student from the South (West Virginia) at a school in New Hampshire during World War II. He attended two summer sessions in 1943 and 1944, and participated in a club whose members had to jump out of a tall tree into the river …showed first 75 words of 1009 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1009 total…a piece of marrow detaches from the bone and stops Finny's heart, killing him. Gene does not cry when he hears the news, because he feels he has become a part of Finny and will always be with him. The boys graduate and go off to enlist in relatively safe branches of the military; Gene is glad that at least his coming regimentation will not take place at Devon, where he spent his idyllic summer.