Born in Andover, Massachusetts, to a prominent Irish Catholic family, where he was one of seven children, the gay writer John Horne Burns spent his life as an author frustrated by the lack od critical recognition of his work. Aducated initially at the Sisters of Notre Dame convent and at the Andover Academy, he then went on to Harvard to study literature, graduating in 1937.

Following a brief period in teaching, he joined the infantry as a private in 1942, served in military intelligence in Casablanca and Algiers, and, finally, due to his knowledge of Italian, was commissioned as a second lieutenant, censoring prisoner-of-war mail in Africa and Italy.

The Gallery, a series of vignettes centered on the Galleria Umberto in Naples, Italy, comments on the social and sexual mores of the American way of life, represented by the escapades of various American service personnel unleashed on the recently liberated Old World. This book presents a memorable, if not perhaps one of the first, portrayals of a Neapolitan gay bar and the wide spectrum of international patrons, both high- and low-born, who frequent it.

A further year teaching at Loomis School, Windsor, Connecticut, followed after war. He also began his publishing career at this time. None of his novels centre on homosexual characters but all deal with gay and/or lesbian figures in a marginal way.

Burns himself remained a dissatisfied figure. When he died of a cerebral hemorrhage it was suggested that he had commited suicide because his literary career had failed to take off and because of the ending of a relationship with an Italian doctor. Initially buried in Rome, his remains were eventually taken back to Boston and reburied there.

Burns's works often feature homosexual themes, and he is known as a midcentury 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." On the other hand, gays and lesbians are by no means the only topic of Burns's fiction.