First as a novel and then as a film, From Here to Eternity enjoyed enormous critical and popular success in the early 1950s. 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. S. military installations at Pearl Harbor. The bulk of Jones's novel relentlessly exposes the exploitation of enlisted men by a cynical officer class. Its naturalistic descriptions of an inhumanly brutal stockade constitute some of the most harrowing passages in American fiction. 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. It is then a unique variation on proletarian fiction with officers equated to...