Lucifer With a Book by John Horne Burns (1949)
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Overview: Fall. Winter. Spring Education, boy, is not something to prepare you for life. That is a vulgar American error. . . . It’s something to take you out of life. Don’t you want to have some small kingdom of your own that no one can take away from you?” Miss Sophia said it, and then she died. Eighty-one years later the private school of her founding opens for a new semester. To it comes Guy Hudson, who by the year’s end would encounter a bizarre staff, who would fall in love variously, and almost give himself to the vulgar American error. Oddly, LUCIFER WITH A BOOK has been out of print for at least two decades. Now as the brief career of John Horne Burns emerges as one of the most important of the post-war years, his remarkable gifts are revealed. It is as Maxwell Geismar noted on publication: “What is apparent. . . . is the dominant sexuality of the novel, and a sexuality that finds expression in harsh and violent terms. There is an inverted Puritanism in Mr. Burns’s work, and a remarkably sophisticated sense of evil and malice . . . You can read LUCIFER WITH A BOOK for entertainment on a high level.”
[Back Cover]
John Horne Burns (7 October 1916 – 11 August 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, alcoholism, relations between the sexes, and sexuality in general, including homosexuality, with the encounter between American and Neapolitan culture as a general thematic backdrop. The “Gallery” referred to is the Galleria Umberto I in down-town Naples.
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.” Burns’s fiction though, is not exclusively restricted to gay themes. Some of his fictional pieces use a heterosexual female perspective, and conformity to class as well as gender expectations plays a large role in these texts.
Genre: MM / Coming of Age
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