John Horne Burns

I just finished reading Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns by David Margolick and I just can't stop thinking about it.  I wrote a review on Goodreads, but I have more to say.  Burns's story is such a sad one:  a promising writer who basically became an alcoholic and died right before his 37th birthday after the excessive drinking and an old head injury (that resulted from him being drunk) did him in.  After having success with his first novel, The Gallery, his next two published works, Lucifer with a Book and A Cry of Children, were critically panned.  Burns was never able to create another work as successful as his first and simply self-destructed.  On top of his alcoholism, he was an awful person to a lot of people and he struggled with being a homosexual in the 1940s and 50s.  I got the feeling from Margolick's biography that Burns simply hated himself and that hate manifested into a hatred for others.  At times he seemed to be aware of his own foul behavior, but he did little to curb it, insulting one person after another throughout his life.  He was always ready to criticize or belittle someone else and I got the feeling he enjoyed putting other people down.  But when the tables were turned and the criticism was heaped upon him, he felt like everyone was working against him.  Those critics just didn't understand what he was trying to say.  They were too stupid to understand his genius and intellect.  What a sad, delusional bastard.  What's even sadder is that he was a talented writer who basically ruined his own life.