Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns
Margolick has assiduously traced Burn’s trajectory from his childhood in Andover, Massachusetts, to college at Harvard, to the only job this brilliant, arrogant, alienating Catholic “dreadful” seemed to be able to land or abide: teaching at a prep school in Connecticut.Dreadfulis the story of a man whose talent is obvious and prodigious, who is widely heralded for his ability and promise, and whose subsequent fall from grace is sharp and dizzying. A cruel man, but a good book.  —Liz Brown