John horne burns biography

John Horne Burns (October 7, 1916 – August 11, 1953) was an American writer, the author of three novels.
John Horne Burns was an American writer, the author of three novels.
Burns was born in Massachusetts, graduated from Andover and Harvard, and went on to teach English at the Loomis School, a boarding school for boys in Windsor.

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John Horne Burns

American writer

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. He was the eldest of seven children in an upper-middle-class IrishCatholic 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.^[1] In 1937 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in English magna cum laude and became a teacher at the Loomis School in Windsor, Connecticut.^[2] Burns wrote several novels while at Harvard and at Loomis, none of which he published.

He was drafted into the US Army as a private in 1942.^[3] He attended the Adjutant General's School in Washington, D.C. Commissioned a second lieu

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HomeAnnouncements‘Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns’ by David Margolick

It’s a sadly familiar story in American literature: an alcoholic gay writer of great talent comes to a tragic end. Think Hart Crane. Think Charles Jackson. And now think John Horne Burns, the subject of David Margolick’s enlightening biography, Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns (Other Press). Much of what you need to know about Burns is in that title. He did indeed live a short life, dying two months shy of his thirty-seventh birthday. He was a gay man during times that were particularly oppressive. And while a dreadful was what Burns campily called a homosexual, the word–unsurprisingly–takes on other meanings in the context of his life. Many who knew him would agree that dreadful was an apt description of Burns himself. As Thomas Brush, one of Burns’ former students who later became the Chairman of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, once said, “He was an interesting, even fascinating man, but although he was usually very amusing

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Ihavejust read one of the best books I've ever experienced in my life: John Horne Burns' The Gallery. A lot has been written recently about Burns: The New York Times had a big piece about him, and the recent biography that came out about him, Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns, by David Margolick, has resurrected this strange, basically one-shot writer from the dustbin of literary failure, but what a one-shot it was. The Gallery was praised when it came out in 1947; it was a bestseller, and Hemingway described it as the book he wished he had written about World War II. It is easy to understand why: The book is hardly a novel and more a series of vignettes, some almost novella-length, others much shorter, all basically taking place in August 1944, in Naples, Italy, after the Americans had taken Naples but the German war was still raging up north in Tuscany. Some of the vignettes are small portraits of men and women within the circle of Naples, and others are "walks" through Naples, Casa Blanca, or Algiers, letting you know what the war did to these plac