50 Fun Facts About A Separate Peace

In A Separate Peace, what game with no teams and no winners does Finny invent using a medicine ball?

Blitzball takes its name from the German blitzkrieg and becomes the unofficial sport of the summer. Finny makes up the rules as he goes and turns out to be a natural at it.

In A Separate Peace, what color shirt does Finny wear as his emblem to celebrate the bombing of Central Europe?

Pink on any other boy at Devon would have risked being torn from his back, but Finny wears it all day and charms every master who asks about it. Gene is irked that his roommate can get away with anything.

At Mr. Patch-Withers's tea party in A Separate Peace, how is Finny wearing his official Devon School tie?

As a belt, which appalls the host's wife until Finny explains that it honors Devon's part in the war effort. Gene, watching, had been hoping to see his friend punished at last.

In A Separate Peace, Finny breaks a Devon School record in which sport and then forbids Gene to tell anyone?

Swimming is not even his sport, yet Finny beats the 100-yard freestyle mark on a whim with only Gene timing him. He refuses to repeat it for a coach, since he only wanted to see if he could.

In A Separate Peace, where do Finny and Gene cycle for hours against school rules the night before Gene's exam?

The beach is three hours away by bike and strictly off limits. Gene gets back just in time for his morning test and fails it, the first he has ever failed.

In A Separate Peace, the injured Finny decides to coach Gene for which event he once hoped to enter himself?

The Olympics of 1944 had been Finny's own ambition before the fall. When Gene objects that the war will cancel them, Finny simply answers that there is no war.

In A Separate Peace, Finny breaks his leg a second time by falling down a staircase made of what material?

Marble is so hard that, when Gene returns as an adult, the old steps are still barely worn in the middle. He calls that hardness a crucial fact he had overlooked.

In A Separate Peace, what escapes into Finny's bloodstream during surgery on his leg and kills him?

Bone marrow slips out while the school doctor is setting what he had called a clean, simple break. He tells Gene that an operating room, like the war, is a place where the risks are just more formal.

Which real boarding school, attended by author John Knowles, is the model for Devon in A Separate Peace?

Phillips Exeter Academy really had a tree-jumping club, and John Knowles spent most of one summer there on crutches after a bad leap. He said the real summer held no anger or hatred, only friendship.

In A Separate Peace, Gene decides that wars are made by "something ignorant" in what?

The human heart is where Gene lays the blame, rejecting Brinker's claim that their fathers' generation caused the war. He had already met that ignorance in himself, on the tree limb.

In A Separate Peace, what name does Finny give the secret club whose members must leap from the tree?

The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session meets every single night, because Finny prizes rules of his own making. Gene dreads each leap but never misses one, afraid of losing face with his friend.

In A Separate Peace, what does Gene do to the limb just before Finny loses his balance and falls?

Jounces it while keeping a firm hold on the trunk, and the novel never settles whether he meant to. Finny turns to look at him with extreme interest before hitting the bank.

In A Separate Peace, the Devon School stands in which New England state, where Gene returns one wet November?

New Hampshire is also home to the real school behind Devon, where the author studied in the 1940s. Gene comes back fifteen years after graduating to face two places that still frighten him.

In A Separate Peace, what does Gene do alone in his room after the accident that makes him feel like someone else?

Tries on Finny's clothes, then sees his friend looking back at him from the mirror. For one evening he feels sure he will never again be confused about who he is.

In A Separate Peace, how does the tree strike the adult Gene when he finally finds it beside the river?

Smaller than he recalled, and so like its neighbors that he can only pick it out by the marks on its bark. The giant of his memory has shrunk, and he walks back through the rain feeling changed.

In A Separate Peace, in which city does Gene stop on his way back to Devon to confess to Finny?

Boston is where Finny is recovering at home, propped up in a big armchair. When Gene blurts out that he caused the fall, Finny furiously refuses to believe it and tells him to leave.

In A Separate Peace, which Devon staff member tells Gene that Finny will never play sports again?

Stanpole, the school doctor, breaks the news and asks Gene to help his friend accept it. Gene bursts into tears, mostly because he had not expected to be treated with kindness.

On their forbidden overnight trip in A Separate Peace, what does Finny call Gene, who cannot say it back?

His best pal is how Finny puts it, and Gene knows that baring a feeling so openly takes courage at Devon. He means to answer in kind, but something deeper than thought stops him.

In A Separate Peace, which exam does Gene fail, the first of his life, after the overnight trip with Finny?

Trigonometry is the test Gene flunks, and it convinces him that Finny lured him away on purpose to wreck his grades. The suspicion turns out to be false, which he finds even harder to bear.

In A Separate Peace, which classmate is Gene's only real rival to finish as head of the class?

Chet Douglass is held back, in Gene's view, by a real love of learning that sends him reading far beyond the syllabus. Gene studies only for the marks, so he expects to win.

In A Separate Peace, what does Finny organize to liven up a dull Saturday while Devon is deep in snow?

A winter carnival, with snow statues and prizes scraped together from the dormitories. Gene remembers the afternoon as a momentary, illusory, special and separate peace.

In A Separate Peace, Finny tells Gene the war is a hoax cooked up by which group of people?

Fat old men, he says, cooked up the war just as they cooked up Prohibition and the Depression. Asked why he alone has seen through it, Finny answers bitterly that it is because he has suffered.

In A Separate Peace, a recruiting film persuades Leper to become the first in his class to join which unit?

The ski troops looked clean and graceful on screen, gliding down a mountainside, and Leper was gone within a week. Being nearly eighteen, he could still pick his service before the draft picked for him.

In A Separate Peace, how does word arrive from Leper that he has "escaped" and needs Gene to come at once?

A telegram is handed to Gene in the middle of the snow games, signed "Your best friend" and naming only a "Christmas location". Gene works out that it must mean the family home.

In A Separate Peace, what do the Devon boys volunteer to dig out after an early snowfall to help the war effort?

Railroad tracks are cleared just in time for a troop train to roll through, packed with cheering recruits barely older than the diggers. The Devon boys are left feeling like children playing among heroic men.

In A Separate Peace, what is Leper out hunting for in the woods while his classmates shovel snow?

A beaver dam up the Devon River is his goal, and he finds it. Brinker is so disgusted to be at a school where boys go looking for such things in wartime that he vows to sign up the next day.

After Finny's fall in A Separate Peace, Gene signs up as assistant manager of which Devon team instead of competing?

Crew needed an assistant senior manager, a job usually left to boys who could not play. Finny is horrified when he hears, and tells Gene that from now on he must play sports for both of them.

In A Separate Peace, Gene throws a punch at Cliff Quackenbush for calling him what?

Maimed is the word, and Gene swings before he can think, fighting as though the insult had been aimed at Finny. Both boys end up in the dirty water beside the boathouse.

In A Separate Peace, Finny declares his Saturday games open by setting fire to a copy of what?

The Iliad, a translated copy put up as a prize, is set alight to declare the games open. Hard cider keeps the afternoon lively until bad news about Leper brings it to a stop.

In A Separate Peace, which marshy, salty river does Gene tumble into during his fight with Cliff Quackenbush?

The Naguamsett is governed by the moon and the Gulf Stream, everything the freshwater river of the summer was not. Gene comes to link it with winter and the war.

In A Separate Peace, what does Brinker stage late at night in the Assembly Room to settle how Finny fell?

A mock trial, which Gene first takes for a senior prank until Brinker opens with a prayer and the mood turns too solemn to laugh off. Leper is fetched as the surprise witness.

In A Separate Peace, which subject does Gene tutor Finny in, though Finny doubts a dead language was ever real?

Latin is the homework, and Finny refuses to believe in Caesar any more than he believes in the war. That same evening he finally admits the war is real, because he has seen what it did to Leper.

In the infirmary in A Separate Peace, Finny admits he has spent months secretly doing what?

Trying to enlist, by writing to every service he could think of, only to be refused because of his leg. Gene tells him he would have been hopeless in a war anyway, far too quick to befriend the enemy.

At Finny's funeral in A Separate Peace, Gene does not cry because he feels the burial is whose?

His own funeral is how it feels to Gene, and he reasons that nobody cries at that. So much of who he was had become bound up with Finny that part of him is buried too.

In A Separate Peace, Finny finally decides that what Gene did on the limb was "just some kind of" what?

Blind impulse is the phrase, and with it Finny accepts that no long-held hatred lay behind the fall. The two friends make their peace shortly before the operation that kills him.

In A Separate Peace, Gene travels overnight to which state to find Leper hiding at his family home?

Vermont is where Leper has fled, absent without leave, and Gene finds him twitchy and close to tears in the dining room. The visit ends with Gene running back to town, refusing to hear any more.

After graduating in A Separate Peace, which service does Gene join, only to find the fighting nearly over?

The Navy takes Gene, but he never sees combat and never learns to hate the enemy. He says his war ended before he put on a uniform, because he had already killed his enemy at Devon.

When Gene visits the runaway Leper in A Separate Peace, Leper accuses him of being what "underneath"?

A savage underneath is Leper's verdict, and he follows it by saying Gene knocked Finny out of the tree. Gene proves the point on the spot by knocking over Leper's chair.

In A Separate Peace, Leper deserts to avoid which Army discharge given to soldiers judged mentally unfit?

Section Eight on his record would have made him unhireable, Leper believes, so he ran before the Army could issue it. Sleepless in training camp, he had begun to see things that were not there.

On the last page of A Separate Peace, Gene says everyone except Finny built what against an enemy who never came?

Maginot Lines, he says, raised at infinite cost against an enemy who never attacked that way, if he was an enemy at all. Finny alone felt no such fear and built no such wall.

In A Separate Peace, the pictures Gene pins to his wall give a falsely grand idea of his home in which region?

The South is home, though the plantation mansions on his wall are not, and Gene admits he once put on an accent to match. By his last year he no longer feels he needs a false identity.

In A Separate Peace, which of these does Finny hold as a personal commandment about sports?

You always win, as Finny sees it, because it never occurs to him that the other side is beaten. He keeps other private rules too, such as never lying about your height.

In A Separate Peace, how does Gene try to get into Finny's infirmary room on the night of the second fall?

Through the window, after crouching in the bushes outside until the adults have gone. Finny thrashes in his bed and demands to know whether Gene has come to break something else in him.

In A Separate Peace, Leper tells Brinker's late-night gathering that the two boys on the limb moved like what?

An engine with two pistons is the picture he gives, one boy sinking as the other moved. Asked which of them moved first, he refuses to tell just because it happens to suit Brinker.

The title of A Separate Peace echoes a phrase from which Ernest Hemingway novel?

A Farewell to Arms has Lieutenant Frederic Henry walk away from the First World War on terms he sets himself. Knowles gave the idea to schoolboys who have not yet seen a battlefield.

Which American writer, a schoolmate of John Knowles, was the model for Brinker Hadley in A Separate Peace?

Gore Vidal was two years ahead of Knowles at school and wrote in his memoir that the author had told him so. The two stayed friends for many years, and Vidal said he admired the novel.

In which city was A Separate Peace first published, after eleven American publishers had turned it down?

London publisher Secker and Warburg took the book when American editors doubted anyone would read about prep-school boys. Glowing English reviews then won it a New York edition the next year.

A Separate Peace won a first-novel award from the foundation of which American author, giving its sales a lift?

William Faulkner lent his name to the prize, and sales picked up considerably once the book had won it. By the mid-1960s many English teachers had put it on the syllabus.

A Separate Peace grew out of "Phineas", a short story John Knowles sold to which magazine?

Cosmopolitan ran the story in May 1956, three years before the novel. Knowles expanded it by writing for an hour each morning before leaving for his editing job at Holiday magazine.

Which future star of TV's The Hardy Boys played Gene in the 1972 film of A Separate Peace?

Parker Stevenson got his first notable screen role as Gene, opposite John Heyl as Finny, in a film Knowles himself helped to script. He became Frank Hardy on television five years later.