[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.
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, maimly in Naples where he set his most fortunate novel, censoring prisoner-of-war mail.
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.
If Americans can still write in this sort of exultation of pity and disgust of the foul spots in the last few years of our history, then perhaps there is still hope that we can recover our manhood as a nation and our sense of purpose in the world.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.
"[7] Time magazine mentioned that the novel depicted "an evening spent in a homosexuals' hangout", an entire chapter other reviewers left unmentioned.
Who said they were any good?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.
[10] 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?
"[11] Now sought for his own views on literature, Burns authored an occasional appreciative review,[12][13] but became well known for unmeasured critiques of both peers and more successful writers, including James Michener, Thomas Wolfe, and Somerset Maugham.
One critic wrote in the New York Times:[16] Lacking in real significance, flawed by excessive malice and nightmarish distortions, [A Cry of Children], nevertheless, reaffirms the author's status as one of America's gifted young writers.
"[18] 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.
[19] Some of Burns's papers, including student works and unpublished manuscripts, are held at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.