On the night in June 1947 when “The Gallery” finally appeared, Burns’s editor at Harper, Frank MacGregor, gave him a party in New York. Always nervous around strangers, Burns, whose feats of drunkenness in the Army were legendary (after falling down face first one night at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, S.C., he landed in the base hospital with a concussion), did what Burns invariably did: he drank, then drank, then drank some more. Then he vanished. “A tension had been building up in me for weeks, and I guess I simply blew my top after I’d got some alcohol in me,” he wrote MacGregor after surfacing a few days later. “The last thing I remember at all is sitting down to a steak; then everything is a blank till I woke up when the train hit the South Station [in Boston]. The homing instinct of drunkards.”

He could have relaxed, even without the booze. The reviews of “The Gallery” were close to ecstatic. In The New York Times, Charles Poore praised Burns’s “rancorously vivid portfolio of portraits,” while in The New York Sun, William McFee called Burns “recklessly extravagant”: “The clever professional novelist would have made half a dozen novels out of it,” he claimed. As remarkable as Burns’s achievement was his potential. “I feel pretty certain that Mr. John Horne Burns, when he has worked at his craft longer, will give us something both solider and more intense than this already remarkable book,” Edmund Wilson wrote in The New Yorker. Ernest Hemingway wrote a friend that September: “Read some damned good books. Latest ‘The Gallery’ — wonderfully written.” Hemingway’s former wife, Martha Gellhorn, wrote to Burns directly, telling him the book had given her “one of the finest days and nights for a long time, going very slowly back to Italy.” “I think you write like an angel and see beautifully,” she told him. Meantime, younger veterans convinced they had war books of their own somewhere inside themselves were both inspired and intimidated by Burns’s. After reading “The Gallery” (along with Norman Mailer’s “Naked and the Dead” and James Jones’s “From Here to Eternity”), Joseph Heller feared he had nothing left to say.

Particularly striking was the praise Burns won from his peers — the men who served with him. “He had heard the same noises, had smelled the same odors,” William Weaver, a writer and translator who had also spent time in Naples, later wrote of him. Not even the military brass took issue with Burns’s depiction of soldierly boorishness. By 1947 Americans were sick of war, familiar with how it had disfigured its boys and saturated with wartime propaganda. Soldiers were both too familiar and too ubiquitous — the war had minted 16 million of them — to be sacrosanct. Decades would pass before the revisionist deification of the “greatest generation” took hold, and the G.I.’s of that time became officially unassailable.

Whether out of disdain and discomfort or just plain cluelessness, the book’s pervasive gayness — apparent not just in the chapter on Momma’s bar but from the “bobby pin” clues sprinkled throughout — was almost entirely ignored. Time magazine was bold enough to mention Burns’s “first-rate” depiction of “an evening spent in a homosexuals’ hangout,” but few others touched the subject, even elliptically. This conspiracy of silence insulated Burns from the hostility that greeted Gore Vidal’s more explicitly gay novel, “The City and the Pillar,” which appeared the following year and which the hypercompetitive Burns, who once called Vidal “our principal rival in the welterweight division,” cattily dismissed as a “dismal failure.” (Burns was equally critical of the era’s other major gay writer, Truman Capote, calling his novel “Other Voices, Other Rooms” “nonsense” and predicting that Capote’s infamous jacket photograph — featuring, as Burns described it, “the fingernail polish, the waistcoat, the hairdo of a Mongolian idiot” — would finish him.)

Though it’s hard to document (there were not yet any gay publications to speak of), gay readers immediately recognized “The Gallery” for the literary landmark it was and talked it up. The gay writer and ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein admired it “extravagantly,” according to Christopher Isherwood. At places gays frequented, like the writers’ colony at Yaddo, it was discussed continuously. The first edition of the homosexual Baedeker, “The Gay Girl’s Guide,” published in 1949, called the chapter on Momma “splendid.” The equally competitive Vidal, who confessed in his journal that he found Burns’s talent positively painful — “the dignity of ‘The Gallery’ is like a blow,” he complained — later called “Momma” one of the most brilliant passages in all of gay literature.

Suddenly, Burns was not only a public intellectual, but a sexy one, probably the first author ever to be praised in Harper’s Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar. In Harper’s Magazine, John Aldridge, poised to become one of America’s most influential postwar critics, pronounced Burns emblematic of the new crop of war writers — more worldly, resourceful and resilient than their counterparts from the last war, less likely to retreat into European exile. “Burns sees truth with a ferocity of insight any age before ours would have found impossible to bear,” he wrote. Harper’s Bazaar named Burns one of its Men of the Moment, running a romantic photograph of him taken on a gritty New York street. The Saturday Review of Literature put Burns on its cover as the best war novelist of 1947.