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, mainly in Naples, the setting for
The Gallery. There, he censored prisoner-of-war mail. 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. Major newspapers and authors including
Ernest Hemingway and
Edmund Wilson praised it. 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. 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's
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?" Now sought for his own views on literature, Burns authored an occasional appreciative review, but became well known for unmeasured critiques of both peers and more successful writers, including
James Michener,
Thomas Wolfe, and
Somerset Maugham. Disheartened by the critical reception of his second novel, Burns returned to Italy in 1950, this time choosing Florence. There he wrote his last published work,
A Cry of Children (1952), which was marketed as "a merciless novel" of "young love in the bohemian fringe-world". Its principal character was a composer and pianist likely modeled on his Harvard classmate
Irving Fine. He began work on a fourth novel, left unfinished at his death. In his time in Florence, he was known to drink to excess and complain of critics, rivals, and both friends and enemies. Vidal never saw him there: "In those years one tried not to think of Burns; it was too bitter. The best of us all had taken the worst way." In 1959–1960, a plan for a film in the Italian neorealist mode based on
The Gallery was postponed when the participants argued about the negative depiction of both the Neapolitans and Americans. Some of Burns's papers, including student works and unpublished manuscripts, are held at the
Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center,
Boston University. One chapter of
The Gallery, "Queen Penicillin", has been included in collections of short stories, such as
The Best Short Stories of World War II, An American Anthology (1957) and
American Men at Arms (1964). Another chapter, the narrator's first assessment of the Americans' treatment of the Neapolitans, was included in
The Vintage Book of War Fiction (1999). ==Writing==