James Jones
American novelist (1921–1977), author of From Here to Eternity (1951; National Book Award), The Thin Red Line (1962), and Whistle (1978). Mailer meets him in 1951, the year of From Here to Eternity and of Barbary Shore. The friendship — a three-way one with William Styron — will run through the 1950s and beyond, sustained from the mid-1950s by Jones's move to Paris and by regular Mailer visits.
Mailer meets Jones and William Styron in 1951. The three are the principal young male novelists of the post-WWII generation — each with a breakthrough long novel of the Pacific or European theater (Mailer’s Naked, 1948; Jones’s From Here to Eternity, 1951; Styron’s Virginia-set Lie Down in Darkness, also 1951).
Jones moves with his wife Gloria to Paris in the late 1950s, establishing the Jones apartment on the Île Saint-Louis as a recurring hub for American writers in Paris through the 1970s; Mailer is a frequent guest.
Jones’s Viet Journal (1974) and the posthumous Whistle (1978) occasion further Mailer comment in the 1970s. Mailer assessed Jones’s early work (alongside Styron, Capote, Kerouac, Bellow, and others) in “Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room” (59.10).