David Margolick. (2013). Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns. Other Press.

David Margolick. 2013. Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns. Other Press.

David Margolick, Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns. Other Press, 2013.

David Margolick. Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns. Other Press, 2013.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{97964A3D-11F3-4D69-B8ED-685D20BC728E}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{97964A3D-11F3-4D69-B8ED-685D20BC728E}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/979/64A/3D/{97964A3D-11F3-4D69-B8ED-685D20BC728E}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/979/64A/3D/{97964A3D-11F3-4D69-B8ED-685D20BC728E}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781590515723
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 221563
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 221563
     2. • type: ASIN
        • value: B008C8ECR4
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 221563
     2. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781590515723
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: David Margolick

title

Dreadful

dateAdded

2013-12-31T18:03:00-05:00

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=1188912
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

sortTitle

Dreadful The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns

crossRefId

1188912

subtitle

The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns

id

97964a3d-11f3-4d69-b8ed-685d20bc728e

starRating

2.6

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: Dreadful_9781590515723_1188912
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 8082568
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781590515723
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 221563
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 6/4/2013
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/dreadful?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: Dreadful_1188912
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 221563
     2. • type: ASIN
        • value: B008C8ECR4
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 6/4/2013
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/dreadful?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: Dreadful_9781590515723_1188912
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781590515723
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 221563
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 6/4/2013
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/dreadful?.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: politics
2. • value: Biography
3. • value: War
4. • value: Literary Criticism
5. • value: autobiographies
6. • value: Autobiography
7. • value: Military
8. • value: 20th Century
9. • value: Gay
10. • value: art
11. • value: biographies
12. • value: Military History
13. • value: LGBT
14. • value: Lesbian
15. • value: literature
16. • value: Literary
17. • value: gifts for dad
18. • value: political books
19. • value: Literary gifts
20. • value: fathers day gifts
21. • value: military books
22. • value: military history books
23. • value: war books
24. • value: grandpa gifts
25. • value: lgbt books
26. • value: dad gifts
27. • value: biographies of famous people

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Margolick, David
   • bioText: David Margolick is the author of five books, including Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song (Harper Perennial, 2001), Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink (Vintage, 2006), and Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock (Yale University Press, 2011). He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
   • name: David Margolick

publishDate

2013-06-04T00:00:00-04:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Dreadful

fullDescription

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.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times
   • content: "[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."
2. • premium: False
   • source: The New Yorker
   • content: "[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."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Edmund White, The New York Review of Books
   • content: "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."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Doug Ireland, History News Network
   • content: "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."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Jonathan Galassi, President of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
   • content: "A fascinating portrait of an heroically difficult character on a collision course with an indifferent world."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Edmund White
   • content: "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."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Michael Bronski, Harvard University
   • content: "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."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters and Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
   • content: "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."
9. • premium: False
   • source: John Loughery, author of The Other Side of Silence: Men's Lives and Gay Identities, a Twentieth-Century History
   • content: "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."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Louis Begle
    • content: "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."
11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      April 8, 2013
      Margolick’s dutiful profile of writer John Horne Burns—whose successful 1947 novel The Gallery was followed by two ill-received titles—fills a needed hole in American literary biography. Margolick (Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock) chronicles Burns’s upbringing and education in Massachusetts—where he was raised between two worlds, being both well-to-do and Irish Catholic—his prewar years teaching at a school he would later fictionally eviscerate, his war service in North Africa and Italy, his success with The Gallery and return to teaching, his subsequent literary stinkers, and return to Italy. Though the book’s fast pace accomplishes the difficult task of evoking sympathy for the generally unlikeable Burns, Margolick makes only shallow attempts to examine his subject’s contradictions. Particularly puzzling are the few supporting characters who loom large in Burns’s life: his mother; an old pupil with whom he developed a bond; not to mention—most peculiar for a book claiming to address Burns’s sexuality and the trials of mid-century life as a gay man—his lovers. All secondary characters are introduced abruptly; the boyfriend with whom Burns spent many of his final years, before his sudden and premature death, earns only two sentences of independent page time. Still, the book largely hits its mark, and an oft-forgotten literary figure receives overdue attention.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from June 15, 2013
      A revealing biography of the brilliant, arrogant author of The Gallery (1947), a celebrated World War II novel. John Horne Burns (1916-1953) grew up in a wealthy New England family and attended Harvard, where he began a lifetime of drinking that ended in lonely days as a regular at a hotel bar in Italy, where he died an embittered drunk at age 36. He attended and taught at Loomis, a prep school outside Hartford, Conn. As a student there many years later, Vanity Fair contributor Margolick (Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, 2011, etc.) became fascinated by the forgotten author whose Lucifer with a Book (1949), a vicious novel about Loomis, was forbidden reading at the school. Years later, Margolick encountered The Gallery, about U.S. soldiers in occupied Naples in 1944-1945, "perhaps America's first great gay novel." Even Margolick's warning that Burns was a difficult man to like does not fully prepare readers for this story of an obnoxious, hypercritical, mean-spirited loner. For all his negativity, however, Burns was able to write his life-embracing The Gallery, a compassionate view of characters passing through a vast arcade, including gays in uniform. Always arrogant, Burns had nonetheless become more open-minded and decent as a result of his wartime experiences that inform the novel. Sensitive, well-researched and drawing nicely on the novelist's vivid letters, the book covers Burns' abnormally close relationship with his heiress mother; his years as a student and, later, disgruntled teacher at Loomis; his wartime postings in North Africa and his beloved Italy; and his career as an author, from the ecstatic acclaim for his war novel, to the poor reviews of later works, to his rivalry with Gore Vidal, who called Burns "a gifted man who wrote a book far in excess of his gift." Not a fun read, but a wonderfully crafted portrait of a tormented homosexual writer.

      COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

43

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/97964a3d-11f3-4d69-b8ed-685d20bc728e/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

97964a3d-11f3-4d69-b8ed-685d20bc728e

starRating

2.6

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{97964A3D-11F3-4D69-B8ED-685D20BC728E}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{97964A3D-11F3-4D69-B8ED-685D20BC728E}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/979/64A/3D/{97964A3D-11F3-4D69-B8ED-685D20BC728E}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/979/64A/3D/{97964A3D-11F3-4D69-B8ED-685D20BC728E}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Biography & Autobiography
2. • value: LGBTQIA+ (Nonfiction)
3. • value: Military
4. • value: Nonfiction

publishDateText

06/04/2013

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9781590515716

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

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...

sortTitle

Dreadful The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns

crossRefId

1188912

subtitle

The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns

publisher

Other Press

bisacCodes

1. • code: BIO007000
   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Literary
2. • code: BIO008000
   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Military
3. • code: BIO031000
   • description: Biography & Autobiography / LGBTQ+