James Jones 's principal claim to attention is his World War II trilogy. From Here to Eternity (1951) is a narrative of the peacetime army, concluding with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Thin Red Line (1962) recounts the taking of Guadalcanal in 1943, and Whistle, posthumously published in 1978, is the story of wounded veterans returned for hospital treatment in the United States. Closely related to the trilogy is a novella, The Pistol (1959), set in Hawaii at the same time as From Here to Eternity. These four books offer a bleak, supremely professional, highly antiromantic account of the anonymous, uncelebrated enlisted man's World War II that is unmatched in American literature.

James Jones was born on 6 November 1921 in the small town of Robinson, Illinois, to Ramon and Ada Blessing Jones. The family had been socially prominent and prosperous but suffered hard times during the author's childhood. "I ... grew up," Jones...