James Jones

American · 1921 to 1977

Born on 6 November 1921 in Robinson, Illinois, James Jones grew up the son of a small-town dentist whose practice and family fortune collapsed in the Depression, and he enlisted in the Army at seventeen with little left to keep him at home. He trained with the 27th Infantry Regiment at Schofield Barracks on Oahu and was still stationed there on the morning of 7 December 1941, when Japanese aircraft came in low over the mountains toward Pearl Harbor. He fought with the same regiment on Guadalcanal, was wounded in the head in combat and reinjured an old football ankle, and was discharged a corporal in July 1944 with a Purple Heart. Back in Robinson, he met Lowney Handy, an older, married woman who became his lover, editor, and, in 1950, his co-founder of the Handy Writers' Colony in nearby Marshall, Illinois, a small commune where aspiring novelists lived and wrote under her strict discipline. Jones spent years there turning his Hawaii service into From Here to Eternity, which Charles Scribner's Sons published in February 1951 to enormous controversy over its profanity and its unsparing picture of Army brutality, and which won the National Book Award the following year. He married the actress Gloria Mosolino in 1957, and the couple soon settled in Paris, where they lived for sixteen years among an expatriate circle of writers and artists while Jones wrote Some Came Running, The Thin Red Line, and several further novels. The family returned to the United States in 1974, settling on Long Island, New York. Jones died of congestive heart failure on 9 May 1977 in Southampton, aged fifty-five, leaving his final novel, Whistle, to be completed from his notes by his friend Willie Morris.