Lucifer with a Book

by John Horne Burns

"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.

Genres: Fiction

340 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1949

About the author

John Horne Burns was a United States author. He is best known as the author of the 1947 story-cycle The Gallery, which depicts life in Allied-occupied Naples, Italy, in 1944 from the perspective of several different characters. In this work he explores the themes of material and class inequality, alcoholism, relations between the sexes, and sexuality in general, including homosexuality, with the encounter between American and Neapolitan culture as a general thematic backdrop. The "Gallery" referred to is the Galleria Umberto I in down-town Naples.

Burns's works often feature homosexual themes, and he is known as a gay novelist. As recorded by his contemporary Gore Vidal, Burns said that "to be a good writer, one must be homosexual, perhaps because his or her marginalized status provides the gay or lesbian author with an objectivity not attainable within mainstream culture." Burns's fiction though, is not exclusively restricted to gay themes. Some of his fictional pieces use a heterosexual female perspective, and conformity to class as well as gender expectations plays a large role in these texts.