He wanted to go very deep ... but he was not a stylist at all. Sometimes his efforts to go deep seemed superficially very clumsy. But consider the effect that the book From Here to Eternity had on everybody I knew — on writers, on fans — and myself included. It just knocked me absolutely cold. We didn't care about the style; I mean, who could care about the style? You were just tremendously moved. I think Prewitt became the prototype for all the laconic, quiet, mysterious, basically tragic heroes populating almost every novel there is now.
Jones