JOHN HORNE BURNS (1916–1953) was born in Andover, Massachusetts, the son of a wealthy Irish Catholic lawyer. He graduated from Harvard and then taught English at a boys’ boarding school before being drafted in 1942. Employed as a censor of prisoners’ mail, Burns spent most of World War II in northern Africa and Italy; his experiences in Naples —including those within the gay community of American servicemen and local Italians—became the raw material for his first novel, The Gallery, published in 1947 to considerable critical acclaim. Disaffected with American culture, Burns soon moved to Italy. He published two further novels, Lucifer with a Book (a satire drawing on his experience as a boarding-school teacher, published in 1949) and A Cry of Children (1952), while supporting himself as a travel writer, but both books received scathing reviews. While working on a fourth novel, Burns died of a cerebral hemorrhage, probably caused by alcoholism.

DAVID MARGOLICK is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and, before that, a longtime reporter for The New York Times. He is the author of, among other books, Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns.

PAUL FUSSELL (1924–2012) was the author of many books on war and twentieth-century culture, including The Great War and Modern Memory, which won the National Book Award. His memoir Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic chronicles the time he spent fighting with the 103rd infantry division during World War II.