The novel "A Separate Peace," shows a friendship and fraternal love that Finny and Gene share. Phineas (Finny) is portrayed as a reckless, competitive and strikingly handsome athlete from a rich (Anglo-Saxon Protestant) and privileged family. Finney is a popular, "all American" teen in New England. Gene is an intellectual, introverted, and awkward adolescent. John Knowles sets this friendship amidst War World II in a Weltanschauung of chaos, racism, xenophobia.
We see the post-war II American scene that excludes women, Jews, foreigners, homosexuals, Catholics, Democrats, ethnics, and promotes "the American Dream" of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It is a "safe time."
