Zusatztext 77578192 Informationen zum Autor David Margolick Klappentext American author John Horne Burns (1916-1953) led a brief and controversial life! and as a writer! transformed many of his darkest experiences into literature. 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! Connecticut. During World War II! he was stationed in Africa and Italy! and worked mainly in military intelligence. His first novel! The Gallery (1947)! based on his wartime experiences! is a critically acclaimed novel and one of the first to unflinchingly depict gay life in the military. The Gallery sold half a million copies upon publication! but never again would Burns receive that kind of critical or popular attention. Dreadful follows Burns! from his education at the best schools to his final years of drinking and depression in Italy. With intelligence and insight! David Margolick examines Burns's moral ambivalence toward the behavior of American soldiers stationed with him in Naples! and the scandal surrounding his second novel! Lucifer with a Book! an unflattering portrayal of his experiences at Loomis. Zusammenfassung American author John Horne Burns (19161953) led a brief and controversial life! and as a writer! transformed many of his darkest experiences into literature. 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! Connecticut. During World War II! he was stationed in Africa and Italy! and worked mainly in military intelligence. His first novel! The Gallery (1947)! based on his wartime experiences! is a critically acclaimed novel and one of the first to unflinchingly depict gay life in the military. The Gallery sold half a million copies upon publication! but never again would Burns receive that kind of critical or popular attention. Dreadful follows Burns! from his education at the best schools to his final years of drinking and depression in Italy. With intelligence and insight! David Margolick examines Burns's moral ambivalence toward the behavior of American soldiers stationed with him in Naples! and the scandal surrounding his second novel ! Lucifer with a Book ! an unflattering portrayal of his experiences at Loomis. ...

"[An] evocative, strangely moving new biography of a largely forgotten novelist with a poisonous character…Cleanly written, with a measure of sympathy and perhaps a little understandable mystification beneath the sober writing, Dreadful inspires a curious combination of fascination, pity and revulsion."—The New York Times

"[A] vivid biography...Margolick reveals a fascinating, troubling character: Catholic, closeted, and alcoholic, charming and cruel, Burns inspired admiration and confusion...By placing Burns's witty, elastic prose front and center, Margolick's account makes a case for him as one of the best writers of his generation."—*The New Yorker

"Despite the decades that have gone by, the lack of living witnesses, and the obscurity of the subject, Margolick has done a superb job researching this sad life."—Edmund White, The New York Review of Books

“Admirable . . . If Burns comes alive in this biography, it is due not just to the enjoyable prose of Margolick—a contributing editor of Vanity Fair—but to the use he makes of Burns’s voluminous, lively, vivid, and evocative correspondence . . . He restores Burns to us without condescension and with enormous sensitivity and sympathy. Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns is a fine piece of work that I heartily recommend without the slightest reservation.” —Doug Ireland, History News Network 

“A fascinating portrait of an heroically difficult character on a collision course with an indifferent world.” —Jonathan Galassi, President of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

“Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival.”—Edmund White 

“Brilliantly explores and exposes the glories and tragedies of a now-forgotten great American writer. In carefully reconstructing Burns’s life and career, Margolick has uncovered the glamorous and often dark underbelly of post-war American literary and intellectual culture. Burns’s story is not so much about homophobia as it is about what it means to be an American artist and intellectual in the years after World War II. Beautifully written and filled with insight and empathy, Dreadful forces us to rethink not only American literary culture, but America itself.”—Michael Bronski, Harvard University 

"Extraordinary. David Margolick takes a once-famous novelist who's become a mysterious footnote in postwar American literature and brings him fully back to life. We see a young, smart, cynical gay man being humanized by World War II and finding a soul—the war chapters are as vivid as My Queer War *by James Lord or *Naples '44 by Norman Lewis—only to have that soul destroyed by alcohol, homophobia, and his own crazy, vindictive pride. It's a powerful story, and Margolick tells it with great energy, humor and understanding." —Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters and*Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

"The subject of Dreadful is a gifted writer of ultimately dissipated gifts, an unconventional intellectual in an age obsessed with conformity, and one of the great caustic, comic letter-writers of his time—a man to make Gore Vidal or Christopher Hitchens look judicious and mild-mannered. But David Margolick explores a raft of larger subjects as well in this engrossing book: what it meant to be gay in mid-twentieth-century America, the cost of sudden fame in a celebrity culture, the allure of postwar Italy, and the tragedy of the uncompromising loner. Likable, Burns wasn't—vivid and memorable, he is." —John Loughery, author of The Other Side of Silence: Men's Lives and Gay Identities, a Twentieth-Century History

“In his biography of John Horne Burns, the author of The Gallery, one of the great World War II novels, David Margolick has told a fascinating and uniquely American story: the destruction of a writer of first-rate talent by liquor and relentless social pressures arrayed against gay men at mid-century.” —Louis Begley, author of *Schmidt Steps Back

*"...*Mr. Margolick is a stylish, insightful writer, particularly good at evoking the ethos of gay midcentury America."—*The Wall Street Journal
"...*the book largely hits its mark, and an oft-forgotten literary figure receives overdue attention."—Publishers Weekly

"A revealing biography of the brilliant, arrogant author of *The Gallery (1947), a celebrated World War II novel...a wonderfully crafted portrait of a tormented homosexual writer."—Kirkus (Starred Review)

"[A] fine biography...Dreadful *is the story of a man whose talent is obvious and prodigious, who is widely heralded for his ability and promise, and whose subsequent fall from grace is sharp and dizzying. A cruel man, but a good book." —*Bookforum

"Margolick's bio offers high drama, a window into pre-Stonewall gayliterary life, and a cautionary tale about success, the war, and the closet."—*The Village Voice

"This book is a well-rounded portrait of an enigmatic man..."—*The New York Observer

"[R]eaders of David Margolick’s new biography, *Dreadful: The Short Life …