Gallery

John Horne Burns served as a US intelligence officer in North Africa and Naples during World War II. He returned from the war to write The Gallery, a bestseller that also earned the admiration of such writers as Edmund Wilson, Norman Mailer, and Gore Vidal. No other book succeeds so well in capturing the confused feelings of horror, cynicism, rage, self-loathing, and desperate, inarticulate desire with which many Americans emerged from the war. Set in occupied Naples in 1944, The Gallery takes its name from the Galleria Umberto, a bombed-out arcade where soldiers and civilians come together in pursuit of food, drink, sex, money, and oblivion. A daring and enduring novel, and one of the first to look directly at gay life in the military, The Gallery surveys the devastated world left behind by what Paul Fussell calls, in his new introduction to Burns's masterpiece, "the worst war in history." Book jacket.Burns, John Horne is the author of 'Gallery' with ISBN 9780877957096 and ISBN 0877957096.