he met when both attended a summer session at Phillips Exeter Academy. Hackett was a friend of Robert F. Kennedy under whom he later served in the US Justice Department. A student, Phineas Sprague, lived in the same dormitory as Knowles during the summer session of 1943 and may have inspired the character's name. In his memoir Palimpsest, Gore Vidal acknowledged that he and Knowles concurrently attended Phillips Exeter Academy with Vidal two years ahead. Vidal stated that Knowles told him that the character Brinker was based on him. "We have been friends for many years now," Vidal said, "and I admire the novel that he based on our school days, A Separate Peace." Awards Knowles won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Selected works A Turn with the Sun (short story), Story No.4, 1953 A Separate Peace (novel), London, Secker & Warburg, 1959; New York, Macmillan Co., 1960 Morning in Antibes (novel), New York, Macmillan, 1962 Double Vision; American Thoughts Abroad, New York, Macmillan, 1964 Indian Summer, New York, Random House, 1966 Phineas; six stories, New York, Random House, 1968 The Paragon (novel), New York, Random House, c. 1971 Spreading Fires, New York, Random House, 1974 A Vein of Riches, Boston, Little Brown, 1978 Peace Breaks Out (novel), New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981 A Stolen Past, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983 The Private Life of Axie Reed, New York : John Knowles, 1986 A Special Time, A Special Place, Exeter Bulletin, 1995 (autobiographical note on internet) References External links John Knowles Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 1926 births 2001 deaths United States Army Air Forces personnel of World War II 20th-century American novelists People from Fairmont, West Virginia People from Southampton (town), New York Phillips Exeter Academy alumni United States Army Air Forces soldiers Novelists from New York (state) Yale University alumni Military personnel from West Virginia Postmodern writers American male novelists American male journalists 20th-century American journalists Hartford Courant people Journalists from West Virginia Novelists from West Virginia PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction winners 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American non-fiction writers