John Horne Burns

Infobox Writer
name = John Horne Burns
birthdate = birth date |1916|10|7|
birthplace = Andover, Massachusetts, United States
deathdate = death date and age |1953|8|11|1916|10|7|
deathplace = Italy
occupation = Novelist, Short story author,
intelligence|officer, officer,Teacher
nationality = United States
period = 1945–1953
genre = fiction

John Horne Burns, (October 7, 1916—August 11, 1953), was a United States author. He is best known as the author of the 1947 story-cycle "The Gallery", which depicts life in Allied-occupied Naples, Italy in 1944 from the perspective of several different characters. In this work he explores the themes of material and class inequality, relations between the sexes, and sexuality in general, including homosexuality, with the encounter between American and Neapolitan culture as a general thematic backdrop.

Biography

Burns was born in 1916 in Andover, Massachusetts. He was the eldest of seven children in a prominent Irish Catholic family. He was educated at the Sisters of Notre Dame convent school and then Andover Academy, where he pursued musical, rather than literary, endeavors. In 1937 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard with a degree in English, and became a teacher at the Loomis School in Windsor, Connecticut. At some point he learned Italian.

Entering the US Army as a private in 1942, he served in military intelligence in Casablanca and Algiers until Pentagon officials sent him to the Adjutant General's School in Washington, D.C. Subsequently commissioned a second lieutenant, he spent the remainder of the war censoring prison-of-war mail in Africa and Italy. These experiences were to provide material for "The Gallery". After his discharge in 1946 he taught at Loomis for another year before returning definitively to Italy.

By far Burns's best-known work, "The Gallery" was published in the summer of 1947. His second novel, "Lucifer with a Book", appeared in 1949, but received little praise, and he wrote travel pieces for "Holiday" magazine to survive. Disheartened by the criticial reception of his novel, he retreated to Italy, where he began his last published work, "A Cry of Children" (1952). When this work also received negative press, he wrote a fourth novel, never to be completed. After a sailing trip, he lapsed into a coma and died from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 11, 1953. Initially buried in Rome, his remains were disinterred and reburied in Boston.

Genre and themes

Burns’s works often feature homosexual themes, and he is known as a gay novelist. As recorded by his contemporary Gore Vidal, Burns said that "to be a good writer, one must be homosexual, perhaps because his or her marginalized status provides the gay or lesbian author with an objectivity not attainable within mainstream culture." [ Vidal, Gore. John Horne Burns. "Homage to Daniel Shays, Collected Essays 1952-1972". New York: Random House, 1972. 181-185.] Burns’s fiction though, is not exclusively restricted to gay themes.

Works

* "The Gallery" (1947)
* "Lucifer with a Book" (1949)
* "A Cry of Children" (1951)

cholarship on Burns

* Aldridge, John W. "After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars". New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951.
* Byrd, David. "John Horne Burns". "Dictionary of Literary Bibiography". 1985 yearbook. Jean W. Ross, ed. Detroit: Gale. 338-343.
* Brophy, Brigid. "John Horne Burns". "Don't Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews". New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. 192-202.
* Graves, Mark A. "John Horne Burns". "glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture." Claude J. Summers, ed. 2002. http://www.glbtq.com/literature/burns_jh.html
* "John Horne Burns, Novelist, 36, Dies". "New York Times" (August 14, 1953): 19.
* Mitzel, John. "John Horne Burns: An Appreciative Biography". Dorchester, Mass.: Manifest Destiny, 1974.
* Smith, Harrison. "Thirteen Adventurers: A Study of a Year of First Novelists, 1947". "The Saturday Review of Literature" (February 14, 1948): 6-8+.

Footnotes

External links

* [http://www.glbtq.com/literature/burns_jh.html glbtq biography]