John Horne Burns
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John Horne Burns (October 7, 1916 – August 11, 1953) was an American writer, the author of three novels. The first, ''The Gallery'' (1947), is his best known work, was very well received when published, and has been reissued several times.


Biography

Burns was born in 1916 in
Andover, Massachusetts Andover is a town in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. It was settled in 1642 and incorporated in 1646."Andover" in ''The New Encyclopædia Britannica''. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 15th ed., 1992, Vol. 1, p. 387. As of th ...
. He was the eldest of seven children in an upper-middle-class
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family. He was educated by the Sisters of Notre Dame at St. Augustine's School and then Phillips Academy, where he pursued music. He attended Harvard, where he became fluent in French, German, and Italian and wrote the book for a student musical comedy in 1936. In 1937 he graduated
Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal ...
with a BA in English ''magna cum laude'' and became a teacher at the Loomis School in
Windsor, Connecticut Windsor is a town in Hartford County, Connecticut, United States, and was the first English settlement in the state. It lies on the northern border of Connecticut's capital, Hartford. The population of Windsor was 29,492 at the 2020 census. P ...
. Burns wrote several novels while at Harvard and at Loomis, none of which he published. He was drafted into the
US Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cla ...
as a private in 1942. He attended the Adjutant General's School in
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Commissioned a second lieutenant and sent overseas in 1943, he served in military intelligence in Casablanca and Algiers and then for a year and a half in Italy, censoring prisoner-of-war mail. After his discharge in 1946 he returned to teaching at Loomis. At Loomis, he completed ''The Gallery'', his best-known work by far, on April 23, 1946. Several publishers rejected it before
Harper & Brothers Harper is an American publishing house, the flagship imprint of global publisher HarperCollins based in New York City. History J. & J. Harper (1817–1833) James Harper and his brother John, printers by training, started their book publishin ...
published it in June 1947 and it became a best-seller. It depicted life in Allied-occupied North Africa and Naples in 1944 from the perspective of several different characters. Without sentimentality, Burns explored the average man's resentment of the military, his struggle to assert his individuality within the complex war effort, the tension between officers and enlisted men, the psychological effects of dislocation, economic and social inequality between the Americans and those they defeated, the experience of homosexual military personnel, and the popular life of Naples in 1944 under the Allied occupation. The title referred to the
Galleria Umberto I Galleria Umberto I is a public shopping gallery in Naples, southern Italy. It is located directly across from the San Carlo opera house. It was built between 1887–1890, and was the cornerstone in the decades-long rebuilding of Naples—called t ...
, a shopping arcade in Naples through which all of the main characters pass. The work was unconventional in structure, comprising portraits of nine characters interspersed with eight recollections narrated by an anonymous American soldier following a route much like the one Burns tracked. Though the book is largely a series of sad and painful vignettes, Burns's narrator manages a modestly positive assessment near the end: "I began to think that something good might be salvaged from the abattoir of the world. Though in the main all national decency and sense of duty might be dead, I saw much individual goodness and loveliness that reassured me." In the words of
Paul Fussell Paul Fussell Jr. (22 March 1924 – 23 May 2012) was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commenta ...
, "Burns relied on discontinuity, like a sort of prose T.S. Eliot, thus suggesting incoherence as a contemporary social characteristic." Major newspapers and authors including
Ernest Hemingway Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century f ...
and
Edmund Wilson Edmund Wilson Jr. (May 8, 1895 – June 12, 1972) was an American writer and literary critic who explored Freudian and Marxist themes. He influenced many American authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose unfinished work he edited for publi ...
praised it. The '' Saturday Review'' called the novel "the best war book of the year".
John Dos Passos John Roderigo Dos Passos (; January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist, most notable for his ''U.S.A.'' trilogy. Born in Chicago, Dos Passos graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He traveled widely as a young man, visit ...
wrote: A 1949 survey of the literature of World War II in ''Military Affairs'' credited Burns for the novel's "psychological study of rear echelon service personnel" and for capturing their speech, faulting only his attempt to depict infantry combat. Charles Poore in the ''New York Times'' thought Burns "has a great deal on the ball and he'll do even better when he gets it more under control." He called it "a rancorously vivid portrait" of "the mentally and morally lost" and noted that "some of its gamier passages show that you can say practically anything in a novel now." ''
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'' magazine mentioned that the novel depicted "an evening spent in a homosexuals' hangout", an entire chapter other reviewers left unmentioned.
Gore Vidal Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit, erudition, and patrician manner. Vidal was bisexual, and in his novels and e ...
later reported a conversation he had with Burns following ''The Gallerys success: A decade later, surveying the American abroad as a literary type,
Frederic Morton Frederic Morton (October 5, 1924 – April 20, 2015) was an Austrian-born American writer. Life Born Fritz Mandelbaum in Vienna, Morton was the son of a blacksmith who specialized in forging (manufacturing) imperial medals. In the wake of the ...
noted how the post-World War II role of conqueror proved so uncomfortable that "with the possible exception of John Horne Burns' ''The Gallery'', no really distinguished novel has recorded it." By 1991 it had become, in
Herbert Mitgang Herbert Mitgang (January 20, 1920 – November 21, 2013) was an American author, editor, journalist, playwright, and producer of television news documentaries. Life Born in Manhattan, he graduated with a law degree from what is now St. John's Uni ...
's words, "that forgotten gem of a novel". In 2011
William Zinsser William Knowlton Zinsser (October 7, 1922 – May 12, 2015) was an American writer, editor, literary critic, and teacher. He began his career as a journalist for the '' New York Herald Tribune'', where he worked as a feature writer, drama edito ...
described it as "the proto-Vietnam novel, anticipating by a generation the hubris that 'the ugly American' would bring to another foreign land" by asking "who was more degraded: the Italians hustling to feed their families, or the GIs selling their cheaply bought PX goods at a huge profit?" Now sought for his own views on literature, Burns authored an occasional appreciative review, but became well known for unmeasured critiques of both peers and more successful writers, including
James Michener James Albert Michener ( or ; February 3, 1907 – October 16, 1997) was an American writer. He wrote more than 40 books, most of which were long, fictional family sagas covering the lives of many generations in particular geographic locales and ...
,
Thomas Wolfe Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was an American novelist of the early 20th century. Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels as well as many short stories, dramatic works, and novellas. He is known for mixing highly origin ...
, and
Somerset Maugham William Somerset Maugham ( ; 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German un ...
. His second novel, ''Lucifer with a Book'', a satirical representation of life at a boarding school much like Loomis, appeared in 1949 to largely unfavorable reviews. Vidal said it was "perhaps the most savagely attacked book of its day." Michener wrote decades later: "Never in my memory had they come so close to total annihilation of an author's work." Disheartened by the critical reception of his second novel, Burns returned to Italy in 1950, this time choosing Florence. There he wrote his last published work, ''A Cry of Children'' (1952), which was marketed as "a merciless novel" of "young love in the bohemian fringe-world". Its principal character was a composer and pianist likely modeled on his Harvard classmate
Irving Fine Irving Gifford Fine (December 3, 1914 – August 23, 1962) was an American composer. Fine's work assimilated neoclassical, romantic, and serial elements. Composer Virgil Thomson described Fine's "unusual melodic grace" while Aaron Copland noted ...
. That novel also received negative press, though he remained still a young writer of promise. One critic wrote in the ''New York Times'': He began work on a fourth novel, left unfinished at his death. He supported himself by writing a long piece about the city for ''Holiday'', one of a series he was writing for that publication on the places where he had lived, and the effort that convinced his editors they could still hope for another successful novel from him. In his time in Florence, he was known to drink to excess and complain of critics, rivals, and both friends and enemies. Vidal never saw him there: "In those years one tried not to think of Burns; it was too bitter. The best of us all had taken the worst way." After a sailing trip, he lapsed into a coma and died from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 11, 1953. His parents and six siblings survived him. He was buried in the family plot in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts. Hemingway later sketched Burns' brief life as a writer: "There was a fellow who wrote a fine book and then a stinking book about a prep school and then just blew himself up." In 1959–1960, a plan for a film in the Italian neorealist mode based on ''The Gallery'' was postponed when the participants argued about the negative depiction of both the Neapolitans and Americans. Some of Burns's papers, including student works and unpublished manuscripts, are held at the
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,
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. One chapter of ''The Gallery'', "Queen Penicillin", has been included in collections of short stories, such as ''The Best Short Stories of World War II, An American Anthology'' (1957) and ''American Men at Arms'' (1964). Another chapter, the narrator's first assessment of the Americans' treatment of the Neapolitans, was included in ''The Vintage Book of War Fiction'' (1999).


Writing

;Novels * ''The Gallery'' (1947), reissued several times by various publishers, by New York Review Books Classics in 2004 * ''Lucifer with a Book'' (1949) * ''A Cry of Children'' (1951)


Notes and references


Additional sources

* * * * *
Graves, Mark A. "John Horne Burns".
An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture.'' Claude J. Summers, ed. 2002.'' * * * Smith, Harrison. "Thirteen Adventurers: A Study of a Year of First Novelists, 1947". ''The Saturday Review of Literature'' (February 14, 1948): 6-8+.


External links


Blake Bailey, "The Misfit in the Gallery"
''Wall Street Journal'', May 31, 2013, review of Margolick, ''Dreadful'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Burns, John Horne 20th-century American novelists American expatriates in Italy American gay writers Harvard University alumni Novelists from Massachusetts People from Andover, Massachusetts 1916 births 1953 deaths American male novelists 20th-century American male writers Burials at Holyhood Cemetery (Brookline) United States Army personnel of World War II United States Army officers 20th-century LGBT people American LGBT novelists Military personnel from Massachusetts