For instance, Warden sets out to seduce Karen Holmes, the allegedly promiscuous wife of his corrupt commanding officer, merely as a political statement but quickly finds himself falling in love with her.

These two motifs are carefully intertwined in Jones's text.

Largely because of its unrelenting expose of the corrupt officer class in the old peacetime army and the frankness of its treatment of sexuality, From Here to Eternity benefitted, in its popular success, from the public's appetite for sensationalism. Lee Prewitt, a boxer and bugler of unusual talent and unyielding principles, and Sergeant Milton Anthony Warden, also a man of integrity but a master manipulator and covert enemy of the officer class as well, are exceptionally well realized. The novel's two central characters, Robert E. Jones's book was awarded the National Book Award for 1952, received overwhelmingly favorable reviews, and became a sensational best-seller (in no small part because of an elaborate publicity campaign by its publisher, Scribner's). It is then a unique variation on proletarian fiction with officers equated to corrupt capitalists and enlisted men to oppressed workers. Still, the novel is, to a large degree, a kind of elegy for the sustaining camaraderie among enlisted men as well as for the sanctuary that the army offered the economically destitute during the Great Depression. Its naturalistic descriptions of an inhumanly brutal stockade constitute some of the most harrowing passages in American fiction. The bulk of Jones's novel relentlessly exposes the exploitation of enlisted men by a cynical officer class. The novel, the first published work of James Jones, is a long and powerful fictional treatment of the United States Army climaxing with the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on U. First as a novel and then as a film, From Here to Eternity enjoyed enormous critical and popular success in the early 1950s.

From Here to Eternity by James Jones