From his first appearance on the literary scene with From Here to Eternity in 1951 …, Jones presented himself, and was viewed by critics, as a writer in whom art and life had synthesized. He possessed a distinct, if limited, talent as a novelist, and asked that his readers accept the honesty of his observations….

Jones was a late arrival in the ranks of those Philip Rahv labeled the "redskins" of our literature. Unlike their "paleface" rivals, the redskin writers were so distinctly American, so much the product of this culture, that even their harshest criticism could be easily absorbed into the American way of looking at things…. For Rahv, the redskin was "a self-made writer in the same way that Henry Ford was a self-made millionaire. On the one hand, he is a crass materialist, a greedy consumer of experience, and on the other a sentimentalist…." Jones is the...