James Jones (author)

James Jones (November 6, 1921 – May 9, 1977) is a midwestern American author who wrote in the tradition of naturalism novels and short stories which often celebrated the endurance of man. He is best known for the fictional portrayals of his real life accounts as a witness to the Pearl Harbor attacks and as a soldier in World War II. The first of these depictions, "From Here to Eternity" (1951) has been named one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library.

At the onstart of his career in the 1950's, Jones was regarded as one of the major novelists of his generation. Today, his works are some of the best material for examining the complete soldiering experience from a spiritual and humanistic perspective.

Life

Born in 1921 in the small community of Robinson, Illinois, James Jones was the son of a Ramon, an alcoholic dentist, and a very religious mother, Ada Blessing. Jones was a perceptive youth, showing early signs that he was something of a born writer. Says Barbara Moody, a friend of Jones' from his earlier years:

"He was intensely interested in people. When you talked with him you were the only person there. He made no judgements. He treated everyone the same, whether he was talking to a small child or anyone."

James, endowed with a sensitive and passionate nature, stood apart from most other inhabitants of Robinson. According to Moody, he tended to live on the edge and was not understood well by others. He enlisted in the Army in 1939 and served in the US 25th Infantry Division before and during World War II, first in Hawaii, where he had the distinction of being the only individual who would become a major writer to witness the attacks on Pearl Harbor. He studied briefly at the University of Hawaii while awaiting his regiment's assignment. Eventually he would enter combat at Guadalcanal for which he earned both a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart for a wound he received in January, 1943. He spent time recovering at a Memphis military hospital before receiving an honorable discharge from the army, returning home to Illinois in 1944 an embittered and angry man.

Back in his hometown, Jones became a drinker and a brawler, revealing a new side of him that contrasted his more compassionate qualities. It was during this time that Jones also became a writer, turning to his experiences in Hawaii and Guadalcanal for the substance of his work. He moved out east in early 1945 to study at NYU. Here he met Maxwell Perkins of Scribner's, to whom he submitted his apprentice novel, "They Shall Inherit the Laughter," a story about soldiers returning home from World War II. The manuscript was rejected, but Perkins gave Jones a monetary advance on a story idea he had about his pre-World War II experience in Hawaii. The author then returned to Illinois where he went back to the drawing board with his second attempt at a novel. During this time Jones also, together with his mentor and lover, local intellectual and free spirit Lowney Handy, formed the Handy Writer's Colony in 1949 just 15 miles north in Marshall, Illinois. The colony was conceived as a Utopian commune where emerging writers could focus on their projects.

That same year, Jones completed what would become his career's catalyst, the novel, "From Here to Eternity". The book was an international best seller and received high critical acclaim. Its success earned Jones, for the first time in his life, both fame and money as well as the National Book Award in 1952. Jones continued to write fiction ("Some Came Running") while still maintaining residence in Robinson, where he built himself a dream-house batchler pad for $85,000. During this time, he frequently travelled, especially to New York City, the literary mecca of the 1950s, where he quickly made friends with literary figures such as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and Budd Schulberg, among others. On one occassion in New York, Styron, Jones, and Mailer were out on the town in Greenwich Village; as they paused for a stoplight, Styron threw his arms around both companions and made the famous statement: "Here we are, the three best writers of our generation, and we're all together!"

In 1957, the author married the enigmatic Gloria Mosalino, who fellow writer Irwin Shaw described as "the candle that kept the house alight." The couple soon moved to Paris as part of the second generation of American Expatriate writers and artists, becoming central figures for the postwar European literary scene. The two lived a lifestyle typical of the Beat generation, spending most of their time in the St-Germain section of the Left Bank, an area "full of all kinds of artistic ferment—painters, writers, poets, playwrights, many of whom are Americans," he wrote a friend in 1959.

Jim and Gloria, deeply in love, had two children in Paris. Jones continued to write books, his next piece 1962's "The Thin Red Line", which served as the second part of his World War II trilogy following "From Here to Eternity." Compelled by an attractive multi-book contract offer from the American publishing house, Dell, Jones left Scribner's at the end of 1964, producing for his new publisher, "Go to the Widow-maker" (1967) and "The Ice-cream Headache and Other Stories" (1968). During this time Jones also served as a European talent scout for Dell and spent considerable time critiquing and encouraging young writers. Work on the final volume of his military trilogy, which he had been developing off and on again over the years, was interrupted twice to produce "The Merry Month of May" (1971) and "A Touch of Danger" (1973).

Following a visit to Vietnam in early 1973, Jones published an account of his trip called "Viet Journal", and around this time began to think seriously of a return to the US. In 1974 he accepted a one-year teaching position at Florida International University in Miami, and wrote the text for the illustrated history "WWII" (1975). At the end of his FIU tenure, James Jones moved to Sagaponack, Long Island and began again to work on the third in his World War II series, "Whistle" (1978). Struggling with worsening health, Jones worked through 1976 and early 1977 to complete the novel but died on May 9, 1977 from heart failure, before he could finish the project. Following his death, his friend Willie Morris added an outline of the unfinished final chapters of the novel, which was then published the following year.

Legacy

Though regarded in his time by some to be one of the generation's greatest voices, Jones was greatly ignored by the writing academy at large. In his book, "James Jones," James R. Giles explains:

"For almost thirty years, James Jones was the friend, and frequently the benefactor, of American writers at home and abroad. Despite his clear importance in the writing community, the academy still largely ignores him. PMLA biographies from 1951 to 1976 list only ten articles about his work in scholarly journals and essay collections, three of which are in publications outside the United States. It often seems that, when academicians remember Jones, it is as the spokesman for an anachronistic male supremacy or as a writer of flawed naturalistic prose."

Regarding the latter of the statement, the criticism Jones received for his "flawed naturalistic prose" was most likely made in error, refferring to the frequent grammatical errors and spelling mistakes made in some of his early stories, including "Some Came Running" (1957). However, it is clearly evident that these "mistakes" were made deliberately to add voice to the uneducated characters whom which the stories portrayed.

Jones also received heavy criticism from members of his own community of Robinson, Illinois. This is due to the subject matter of "Some Came Running", which, to the inhabitants of Robinson, was an obvious portrayal of them, and did not show them in a very positive light. However, over thirty years after the enmity first arose, amends have recently been made between Robinson and their most famous resident. Some members of the community, including a few renowned scholars, started The James Jones Literary Society in 1992, which claims hundreds of members from the U.S. and Puerto Rico. The Society offers information and news of the author and his artistic contributions, as well as an $2,000 fellowship conferred annually to an unpublished writer.

There was a revival in interest of the author when his novel, "The Thin Red Line", was adapted into a major film directed by Terrence Malick, released in 1998. In that same year, "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" was also released as a major film. The movie was an adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Kaylie Jones, James and Gloria's first child, which depicted Kaylie's experiences as James' daughter.

World War II Trilogy

Jones' magnum opus, the three novels which comprised his trilogy examining the evolutionary process of the soldier in World War II, began in 1951 with the publication of his masterwork, "From Here to Eternity". "Eternity" depicted the army life in pre-war Hawaii, drawn from the author's firsthand accounts of his time stationed just before and after Japan's ambush on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The second in the series was "The Thin Red Line" (1964), which exposed us to the intense jungle combat that took place on Guadalcanal. The final piece of the trilogy was "Whistle" (1978), a book Jones worked on through the latter years of his life, was about a group of wounded soldiers coming home to an Army hospital in America's deep South. This, too, was based off of Jones' own experiences as a wounded soldier in a military hospital in Memphis.

The evolutionary process he experienced first-hand as a young man forced to grow up fast as a soldier, was undoubtedly the prime inspiration for the bulk of Jones' works. In his book "WWII" he defined what this process culminates in for a soldier:

"I think that when all the nationalistic or ideological and patriotic slogans are put aside, all the straining to convince a soldier that he is dying for something, it is the individual soldier's final full acceptance of the fact that his name is already written down in the rolls of the already dead."

Furthermore, the author firmly believed that it was an absolute miracle that America evolved such victorious soldiers in such a short amount of time, especially since these same soldiers, unlike the men who comprised the Axis enemy, had grown up believing that war was the greatest wrong. Jones writes of pre-war America in "WWII":

"While most nations were spending young fortunes for wars, and indeed often engaging in them in one form or another, we were teaching our young that war was immoral, and evil, and that, in fact, it was so costly in both treasure and spirit that mankind simply could no longer afford it."

More than anything, Jones' trilogy incites us to remember that the soldier's process was not as aseptic as the history books may convey. According to the author's own words of the series:

"It will say just about everything I have ever had to say, or will ever have to say, on the human condition of war and what it means to us, as against what we claim it means to us."

Bibliography

• From Here to Eternity, (1951) (made into a film in 1953)
• Some Came Running, (1957) (made into a film in 1958)
• The Pistol, (1959)
• The Thin Red Line (1962), (1962) (made into a film in both 1964 and 1998)
• Go to the Widow-Maker, (1967)
• The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories, (1968)
• The Merry Month of May, (1971)
• A Touch of Danger, (1973)
• Viet Journal, (1975)
• WW II, (1975)
• Whistle, (1978) (completed by Willie Morris)

External links

• The James Jones Literary Society
• James Jones Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
• 1975 Audio Interview with James Jones - RealAudio
• James Jones on Find-A-Grave
• Read Jones's interview with The Paris Review

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• James Jones (author)  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "James Jones (author)"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.