Lucifer with a Book

Lucifer with a Book is the second novel by John Horne Burns, the American writer who lived from 1916 to 1953 and whose short literary career produced three novels before his early death from a cerebral hemorrhage at thirty seven in Florence, Italy. The novel was published in 1949, two years after Burns’s first novel The Gallery of 1947 had made him one of the more substantially admired American war novelists of the late 1940s.

Burns had served in the American army during the Second World War in North Africa and Italy and had drawn on the substantial experience for The Gallery, the novel about American soldiers and Italian civilians in occupied Naples that established his literary reputation. The Gallery was widely admired by Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and various of the leading American literary figures of the period, and Burns was expected to produce substantial further work after the success of the first novel.

Lucifer with a Book turned out to be substantially less successful both critically and commercially. The novel is set at an American preparatory school called Academy Hill in the immediate post war years and follows a young veteran English teacher named Guy Hudson through a year at the school. The book combines substantial satirical observation of American private school culture with substantial autobiographical elements drawn from Burns’s own pre war teaching experience at the Loomis School in Connecticut.

The novel was substantially criticised by American reviewers when it appeared, partly because the satirical treatment of American educational institutions struck many reviewers as bitter and excessive, and partly because Burns’s treatment of the homosexual themes that ran through much of his work was substantially more direct than American publishing conventions of the late 1940s were prepared to accept. The substantially hostile reception substantially damaged Burns’s American reputation and contributed to his eventual move to Italy in the early 1950s where he died.

The novel has been substantially reassessed in subsequent decades, with various critics recognising substantial literary merit in the book that the initial reception had failed to acknowledge. The substantial autobiographical content has also made the book a substantial document of the American educational and cultural world of the immediate post war period and of the developing American literary engagement with homosexual themes during the years when such treatment was still substantially constrained.

The book is of interest now to readers of American mid twentieth century literature and to specialists in the substantial Burns rediscovery that has occurred since the 1990s.