Understanding A Separate Peace

PBS's The Great American Read named it one of America's best-loved novels. A Separate Peace has been a bestseller in the United States for nearly thirty years, and it is ageless in its depiction of youth during a time when the entire country was losing its innocence to World War II. A Separate Peace is a horrific and brilliant fable about the dark side of adolescence set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II. Gene is an introverted, lonely intellectual. Phineas is a reckless athlete who is attractive and taunts others. Like the war itself, what happens between the two friends one summer robs these guys and their world of their innocence.