By Michael Mullen, Professor of English, Vincennes University

Jones's second novel, about life in a small Midwestern city following World War II, was published in January of 1958. Jones was prepared for critics to go after him following the success of From Here to Eternity, writing to his editor in September of 1956: "...I know everybody is alerted to the end of this one, and know that all the barbs and hooks and knives and harpoons with which literary people love to score each other are being sharpened up no doubt...." But even Jones must have been surprised by the harshness of the attack, for few serious novels have been so poorly received as was Some Came Running. Alfred A. Knopf commented in the Borzoi Quarterly, "With practically every literary editor complaining everlastingly that he hasn't space in which to print all the reviews he would like to print, one cannot help wondering why such very long reviews have appeared for the sole purpose, apparently, of demonstrating that in the reviewer's opinion James Jones' new novel, Some Came Running, is no damned good."

The earliest review, appearing in Kirkus on 1 November 1957, set the tone for reviews that would follow:

It has nothing--repeat nothing--to recommend it. ...It is a distasteful and unrelievedly boring orgy in the manure pile. And it is so badly written that at no moment in its ghastly length does Jones hold out hope that he is likely to write another creditable book.

Despite the drubbling by critics, Jones through the years maintained he had written a good book, arguing that he would be remembered for Some Came Running, not From Here to Eternity. That hasn't happened, but the attitude towards Running has softened. Burroughs Mitchell, Jones's editor for the book, later wrote:

I have recently had occasion to reread Some Came Running with particular care, and I'm convinced that in spite of its verbosity, its ineffective stylistic experiments, its dubious philosophizing, this novel, which so resembles Dreiser in its faults, can match Dreiser in what it accomplishes. It is a book that has been greatly maligned.

Willie Morris was even more enthusiastic, daring readers to first read Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson and then read Some Came Running. Though he acknowledged the book it flawed, he argued the novel is "the towering work of native social realism that American writers once dreamed of writing."