Historical and cultural material from that period, including political cartoons, memoirs, and even home front diaries, provide strong evidence of this. Research on the 1940s, however, notes that WWII was supported by most Americans. In “Phineas,” World War II is an ambivalent background to the action, whereas in A Separate Peace the war looms as a dismal and frightening reality in “a world on the brink of total chaos and moral disruption” (Heinz & Huss 160). The two pieces are so similar that the novel actually reuses entire passages from the short story, including the moment that Finny falls from the tree, but what separates these two works is their portrayal of war. in 1960, A Separate Peace is closely based on “Phineas,” which first appeared in the May 1956 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine (74-79). Published in London in 1959 and in the U.S. Both John Knowles’s short story “Phineas” and his novel A Separate Peace are bisected by the same incident: the shattering of the schoolboy athlete Phineas’s leg during a summer war game where narrator Gene “jounce the limb” of a tree from which the two boys are about to jump ( ASP 60 “Phineas” 363).
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