From Here to Eternity
by James Jones
Summary
Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, 1941, the peacetime Army in the last year before the war, and Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt has just transferred into G Company carrying his two talents like a curse: he is a gifted bugler who gave up the bugle, and a welterweight who quit boxing after blinding a friend in the ring. Captain Holmes wants him on the company boxing team. Prewitt refuses. What follows is the Treatment: the organised, deniable persecution by which an army breaks a man who will not play, extra duty, manufactured infractions, and the slow escalation toward the stockade.
Beside Prewitt's war with the institution runs First Sergeant Milt Warden's affair with Karen Holmes, the captain's wife, conducted with a recklessness that is half love and half contempt for the man they are both betraying. And beneath both is Maggio, Prewitt's small, furious friend, whose collision with the stockade and its presiding sadist, Sergeant Judson, leaves Prewitt a vendetta to settle.
Jones served in this army at this post, and the book's authority is total: the speech, the drinking, the brothels of Honolulu, the exact mechanics of how power works on men with nowhere to go. Everything converges on the morning of 7 December, which scatters the survivors and settles nothing.
Over eight hundred pages, profane for its era even after the publisher's trims.
Best for readers who want the great novel of the American enlisted man, written in open fury at what armies do to the men who love them.
Historical Context & Significance
From Here to Eternity won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1952, was a massive bestseller, and sold to Hollywood for a reported 82,500 dollars, a famous number at the time. James Jones had served at Schofield Barracks and been present at Pearl Harbor, and the novel arrived stamped with that authority; its language and subject matter, prostitution, venereal disease, the stockade's brutality, pushed the limits of what a mainstream house would print in 1951, and Scribner's still required cuts.
Fred Zinnemann's 1953 film won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, with Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, and Frank Sinatra's comeback as Maggio; the surf embrace became one of Hollywood's permanent images, and the film's sanitising of the novel's rougher content is a standard case study in Production Code adaptation.
Jones spent the rest of his career on the war, The Thin Red Line and Whistle completing the trilogy, and this first book remains the one on which everything rests.