James Jones was the quintessential war novelist. Stationed at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked, then deployed to fight at Guadalcanal, Jones was in a unique position to fictionalize about the World War II combat soldier's experience. His war novels, in fact, often took on the documentary aspects of nonfiction, in addition to providing compelling, realistic drama of soldiers at war. In his career-spanning trilogy—
From Here to Eternity(1951),
The Thin Red Line(1962), and
Whistle(1978)—Jones traced the primary stages of a soldier's evolution, a process he described in his nonfiction account of the war,
WWII(1975). First, according to Jones, comes the soldier's acceptance, through military training, of his own anonymity in the face of modern technological warfare. Then, with…
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Citation: Kent, Brian. "James Jones". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 January 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2403, accessed 21 November 2024.]
