by James Jones
Born in Illinois, Jones came of age during the Depression in a family that experienced poverty suddenly and brutally. He learned to box in high school, competing as a welterweight in several Golden Gloves tournaments. After graduation he had planned to go to college, but a lack of funds led him to enlist in the army instead.
Before war began he served in Hawaii, where he found himself in regular conflict with superior officers who rewarded Jones’s natural combativeness with latrine duty and time in the guardhouse. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, which Jones witnessed, he was sent to Guadalcanal, site of some of the deadliest jungle fighting of the Pacific Theater. He distinguished himself in battle, at one point killing an enemy soldier barehanded, and was awarded a bronze star for his bravery. He was shipped home in 1943 because of torn ligaments in his ankle, an old injury that was made much worse in the war. After a period of convalescence in Memphis, Jones requested a limited duty assignment and a short leave. When these were denied, he went AWOL.
His stretch away from the army was brief but crucial, as it was then that he met Lowney Handy, the novelist who would later become Jones’s mentor. Jones spent a few months getting to know Lowney and her husband, Harry, then returned to the army, spending a year as a “buck-ass private” (a term which Jones coined) before winning promotion to sergeant. In the summer of 1944, showing signs of severe post-traumatic stress—then called “combat fatigue—he was honorably discharged.
He enrolled at New York University and, inspired by Lowney Handy, began work on his first novel, To the End of the War (originally titled They Shall Inherit the Laughter). Drawing on his own past, Jones wove a story of soldiers just returned from war, presenting a vision of soldiering that was neither romantic nor heroic. He submitted the 788-page manuscript to Charles Scribner’s Sons, where it was read by Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. Perkins rejected it, but saw promise in the weighty work, and encouraged Jones to write a new novel.
Jones began writing From Here to Eternity, a story of the war’s beginning. After six years of work, Jones showed it to Perkins, who was fully impressed and acquired the novel. After Perkins’s death, the succeeding editor cut large pieces from the manuscript, including scenes with homosexuality, politics, and graphic language that would have been flagged by the censor of that era, and published the novel in 1951. The story of a soldier at Pearl Harbor who becomes an outcast for refusing to box for the company team, it is an unflinching look at the United States pre-WWII peacetime army, a last refuge for the destitute, the homeless, and the desperate. The book was instrumental in changing unjust army practices, which created a public outcry when it was published. It sold 90,000 copies in its first month of publication and captured the National Book Award, beating out The Catcher in the Rye. In 1953 the film version, starring Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and made Jones internationally famous.
He returned to Illinois to help the Handys establish a writers’ colony. While living there he wrote his second novel, Some Came Running, which he finished in 1957. An experimental retelling of his Midwestern childhood, it stretched to nearly 1,000 pages and drew little acclaim.
In 1958, newly married to Gloria Mosolino, Jones moved to Paris, where he lived for most of the rest of his life, spending time with his old friend Norman Mailer and contributing regularly to the Paris Review. There he wrote The Thin Red Line (1962), his second World War II epic, which follows a company of green recruits as they join the fighting in Guadalcanal; and The Merry Month of May (1970), an account of the 1968 Paris student riots. The Thin Red Line would be brought to the screen by director Terrence Malick in 1998.
Jones and his wife returned to the United States in the mid 1970s, settling in Sagaponack, New York. There Jones began Whistle, the final volume in his World War II trilogy, which was left unfinished at the time of his death. However, he had left extensive notes for novelist and longtime editor of Harper’s Magazine Willie Morris, who completed the last three chapters after Jones’s death in 1977. The book was published in 1978.
A young Jones, riding his bike in 1925.
Jones and his sister, Mary Ann, nicknamed “Tink.”
A fifteen-year-old Jones, in 1936.
Jones at the trailer camp where he worked while writing From Here to Eternity in the late 1940s.
Jones working in the room where he wrote the majority of From Here to Eternity. The room was built specifically for Jones by a family friend in Robinson, Illinois.
Jones in 1951, around the publication of From Here to Eternity.
James and Gloria Jones on their wedding day in Haiti, February 1957.
Newlyweds Jones and Gloria, still in Haiti. The couple stayed at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince.
The cast of the film From Here to Eternity in Hawaii. Back row, left to right: Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr, and Burt Lancaster. The movie was released in 1953 and won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Jones with fellow National Book Award winners Marianne Moore, Rachel Carson, and John Mason Brown at the Hotel Commodor in New York City.
Jones with his son, Jamie, and daughter, Kaylie, in 1966. The family was visiting Skiathos, Greece, where Jones had bought a piece of land in hopes of building a house—before ultimately deciding that the area was too quiet.
Jones at Florida International University in Miami, where he taught fiction writing during the 1974—1975 school year.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgment is made to the following magazines in whose pages these stories first appeared:
The Atlantic Monthly for “Temper of Steel.”
Collier’s Magazine for “Greater Love.”
Esquire for “The Tennis Game” and “Two Legs for the Two of Us.”
Harper’s Magazine for “The Way It Is.”
New American Library of World Literature for “A Bottle of Cream” and “None Sing So Wildly.”
Playboy for “The King” and “Just Like the Girl.”
Saturday Evening Post for “Valentine.”
copyright © 1948, 1949, 1951, 1952, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1968, 2002 by Gloria Jones, Kaylie Jones, and Jamie Jones
cover design by Karen Horton
978-1-4532-1564-7
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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