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 …
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…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.