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 Irish Catholic 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 with a BA in English magna cum laude and became a teacher at the Loomis School in Windsor, Connecticut. 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. He attended the Adjutant General's School in Washington, D.C. 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 in April of 1946. Harper & Brothers published it in 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. 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 Allied occupation. The title referred to the Galleria Umberto I, 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.
In the words of Paul Fussell, "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 and Edmund Wilson praised it. The Saturday Review called the novel "the best war book of the year". John Dos Passos 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." Time magazine mentioned that the novel depicted "an evening spent in a homosexuals' hangout", an entire chapter other reviewers left unmentioned.
Gore Vidal later reported a conversation he had with Burns following The Gallery'''s success:
A decade later, surveying the American abroad as a literary type, Frederic Morton 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's words, "that forgotten gem of a novel". In 2011 William Zinsser 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?"