John Horne Burns

John Horne Burns (born October 7, 1916 in Andover, Massachusetts ; died August 10, 1953 in Livorno ) was an American writer.

Life

Burns, son of a wealthy Irish Catholic lawyer, attended Phillips Academy in his hometown of Andover and then studied English literature at Harvard University ( BA 1937). From 1937 to 1942 he was a teacher at the renowned Loomis School in Windsor, Connecticut . He was drafted in 1942 after the United States entered World War II. Because of his knowledge of Italian at Harvard, he was assigned to a reconnaissance company on the Italian front and, until the end of the war, was primarily entrusted with the task of examining the letters of interned Italian prisoners of war. After the end of the war he stayed in Italy until 1946, where he wrote his first book, The Gallery (Eng. “The Gallery”, also published as “Etappe Napoli”), which mainly deals with everyday life in war-torn Naples ; the title refers to the hustle and bustle in the Galleria Umberto I , which developed into the social center of the city during this period, not least because of the flourishing black market . The Gallery was enthusiastically received by literary criticism, became a bestseller and has been translated into several languages. His two other novels Lucifer with a Book (1949) and A Cry of Children (1952) were unanimously panned by the critics. In 1950 Burns settled back in Italy and fell victim to alcoholism there; In 1953 he died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of thirty-six.

The Gallery , meanwhile almost completely forgotten, is now in the canon of American literature alongside Gore Vidal's Williwaw (1946), Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), James Jones' From Here to Eternity (1951) and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse -Five (1969) again counted among the most important works on the experience of the Second World War, and due to its quite blunt portrayal of homosexuality , the novel has increasingly come into the focus of historians of gay literature .

Works

• The Gallery . Harper & Brothers, New York and London 1947.
  • New edition with an introduction by Paul Bailey : Hogarth Press, London 1988, ISBN 0701206640 .
  • New edition with an introduction by Paul Fussell : New York Review Books, New York 2004, ISBN 1590170806 .
  • German edition: The gallery . German by Günther Birkenfeld . Stahlberg, Karlsruhe 1951.
• Lucifer with a Book . Harper, New York 1949.
• A Cry of Children . Harper, New York 1952.

literature

• Mark T. Bassett: John Horne Burns: Toward a Critical Biography . Diss., University of Missouri 1985.
• David Margolick : Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns . Other Press, New York 2013, ISBN 9781590515716 .
• Anthony Slide: Lost Gay Novel: John Horne Burns's The Gallery (Harper & Brothers, 1947) . In: Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly 6: 2, 2004, pp. 131-137.
• William Zinsser: The Gallery Revisited . In: Sewanee Review 100: 1, 1992, pp. 105-112.

Web links

• David Margolick: The Great (Gay) Novelist You've Never Heard Of . In: The New York Times (online edition), June 11, 2013.
• Burns, John Horne (1916–1953) , entry in the online encyclopedia glbtq.com.