Lucifer With A Book

"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 the young new teacher and war veteran 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.

The tragically brief career of John Horne Burns was one of the most important of the post-war years. He was able to publish only three novels before his death in 1953 at the age of 36. All reveal his remarkable gifts.

Maxwell Geismar noted on publication of *Lucifer with a Book:* "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 work, and a remarkably sophisticated sense of evil and malice."

"A master novelist's lethal and brilliant novel of a school. John Horne Burns was by far the most talented, and the most attractively talented, American novelist to emerge after the war." -- Brigid Brophy.