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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John Horne Burns Biography

Americannovelist, born in Andover, Massachusetts, educated at Harvard. Burns's reputation has grown considerably since his death at the age of 36 and his first novel, The Gallery (1947), is now recognized as one of the great American novels of the Second World War. After service in military intelligence in the US Army in North Africa and Italy, Burns returned to the USA but subsequently took up residence in Italy. The Gallery reconstructs life around the Galleria Umberto in Allied occupied Naples at the end of the war through a series of what Burns calls ‘portraits’. The novel is episodic and fragmentary in a manner that echoes that of John Dos Passos, but the confrontation between American and Italian experience, both cultural and moral, evinces striking affinities with the treatment of the ‘international theme’ in the fiction of Henry James. His later novels are Lucifer with a Book (1949), a largely satirical account of an American private school, and A Cry of Children (1952), a love story.

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