Text by Michael Mullen, Professor of English, Vincennes (IN) University

With this novel, Jones established his reputation as an important American writer. Though often described as a war novel, it is more accurately an army novel, for the novel ends not long after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Jones later said that from its inception, Eternity was intended to be the first book of "a trilogy on World War II and soldering." As such, Eternity deals with one of the most important steps in what Jones called the evolution of the soldier: the welding of the individual soldier into an anonymous whole. One of the many strengths of the book is the way the two most important characters, Robert E. Lee Prewitt and Milton Warden, come up against this anonymity, and much of the fighting in the novel is Prewitt's and Warden's struggle against corruption in an army of which they are willingly a part.

Released early in 1951, the book was popular with both readers and critics. Within a month of publication the book had sold 90,000 copies. Representative of the praise from critics is the review by David Dempsey which appeared in The New York Times Book Review:

When a book is as commanding in its narrative power as this one it bears comparison with the very best that is being done in American fiction today. "From Here to Eternity" is the work of a major new American novelist. To anyone who reads this immensely long and deeply convincing story of life in the peacetime army it will be apparent that in James Jones an original and utterly honest talent has restored American realism to a preeminent place in world literature.