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...