The Thin Red Line, originally published in September 1962,[2] shares its central characters with Jones's other two World War II novels, though with their names necessarily altered, and examines their different reactions to combat. Jones had originally intended the central male characters of his previous war novel From Here to Eternity to appear in this work. But Jones remarked that "the dramatic structure—I might even say the spiritual content—of the first book demanded that Prewitt be killed at the end of it". Jones tackled the problem by changing the names of the three characters of the first novel, enabling them to appear in The Thin Red Line. The character of Prewitt became Witt, Warden became Welsh and Stark became Storm.[2] (Jones's later novel Whistle (1978), features a similar set of characters, now named Sergeant Mart Winch, Bobby Prell, and Johnny "Mother" Strange; Corporal Fife in The Thin Red Line also reappears as company clerk Marion Landers in Whistle.)

The novel portrays battle realistically, including several particularly gruesome acts depicted as natural responses to the soldiers' environment, such as the disinterring of a Japanese corpse for fun, the summary execution of Japanese prisoners, and the extraction of their corpses' gold teeth. The novel explores the idea that modern war is an extremely personal and lonely experience in which each soldier suffers the emotional horrors of war by himself.