From Here to Eternity

(Paperback)

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Description

James Jones' epic drama of army life in the calm before Pearl Harbor comes to Penguin Modern Classics - now with previously censored scenes restored Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941. Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a career soldier and a champion welterweight. But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team for reasons he will not explain, he is subjected to brutal hazing by his fellow soldiers. First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he's risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officer's wife. Both Warden and Prewitt are bound by a common bond- the Army. In this magnificent but brutal classic of a soldier's life, James Jones portrays the courage, violence and passions of men and women who live by unspoken codes and with unutterable despair. One of the most important American novels to come out of World War II, From Here to Eternity is a masterpiece that captures as no other the honor and savagery of men.

Reviews

A blockbuster of a book... raw and brutal and angry * The New York Times *
The achievement of an exceptional novelist... Filled with a wide range of human emotions, with humour and nobility, with rage and love, with savagery and tenderness * New York Herald Tribune *
Extraordinary and utterly irresistable ... a compelling and compassionate story * Los Angeles Times *
Ferocious... the most realistic and forceful novel I've read about life in the army * The New Yorker *
The only one of my contemporaries who I felt had more talent than myself was James Jones. And he has also been the only writer of any time for whom I felt any love * Norman Mailer *
Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi belongs to William Faulkner ... A great deal of Honolulu itself has always belonged for me to James Jones * Joan Didion *
From Here to Eternity has fine qualities in abundance... No novel had so vividly - and shockingly, to a civilian readership - conveyed the brutality of peacetime army life * Times Literary Supplement *

Author Bio

James Jones (1921-1977) was born in Robinson, Illinois and enlisted in the US army in 1939, serving in the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii during Pearl Harbor and later in Guadalcanal in the Pacfic, where he was wounded in action. He drew on his wartime experiences in his many acclaimed novels, including the National Book Award-winner From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line.