From Here to Eternity

…in an ambitious trilogy (From Here to Eternity [1951], The Thin Red Line [1962], and Whistle [1978]) that centred on loners who resisted adapting to military discipline. Younger novelists, profoundly shaken by the bombing of Hiroshima and the real threat of human annihilation, found the conventions of realism inadequate…

…of World War II in From Here to Eternity (1951), though a very ambitious project, repels through indifferent writing and sentimental characterization; Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead (1948), an equally ambitious military novel, succeeds much more because of a tautness, a concern with compression, and an astringent objectivity that…

…American novelist best known for From Here to Eternity (1951), a novel about the peacetime army in Hawaii just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

…based on the best-selling novel From Here to Eternity (1951) by James Jones. The sprawling and steamy book was considered unfilmable until Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn accepted the somewhat toned-down script written by Daniel Taradash. Director Fred Zinnemann insisted that the film be shot in black-and-white to underscore