In the first marking period, I got a grade of 28 in mathematics, 14 in physics.
It quickly seemed probable that I would flunk out. I was put back one year and admitted as a lower-middler in September 1942. That essay must have been pretty good because the other tests revealed that I knew little Latin after two years of it in the local school, and that I was almost entirely bereft of math. I possessed a certain amount of calculating cleverness at that time, and when the English entrance examination called for an essay on a novel of my choice, I knew better than to pick some commercial work like Gone with the Wind, opting instead for a novel I knew to be a classic, Jane Eyre.
I knew little else about it, knew no one who had ever gone there, and, although my family visited New England most summers, I had never seen the school. Soon, entrance examinations were arranged for me at the local high school, administered by the principal no less. I was expected to follow him to Mercersburg, but picking up a catalog one day which was lying around the house, the catalog of Phillips Exeter Academy, I found a preliminary application form on the last page and, just for the hell of it, filled it out and mailed it. My brother had, to be sure, gone to Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, but then he dutifully went off to Dartmouth, deep in deepest New Hampshire. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education. My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. It picked me up out of the hills of West Virginia, forced me to learn to study, tossed me into Yale (where I was virtually a sophomore by the time I entered), and a few years later inspired me to write a book, my novel A Separate Peace, which, eschewing false modesty, made me quite famous and financially secure.
Exeter was, I suspect, more crucial in my life than in the lives of most members of my class, and conceivably, than in the lives of almost anyone else who ever attended the school.
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