Edmund White

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Not to be confused with E. B. White.
For the English cricketer, see Edmund White (cricketer).

Edmund White
White in his home in New York, October 2007
White in his home in New York, October 2007
BornEdmund Valentine White III
(1940-01-13) January 13, 1940 (age 81)
Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
Occupation
  • Novelist
  • short story writer
  • non-fiction writer
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Michigan
Period1970s–present
Notable worksThe Joy of Gay Sex, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony
SpouseMichael Carroll
Website
edmundwhite.com

Edmund Valentine White III (born January 13, 1940) is an American novelist, memoirist, and an essayist on literary and social topics. Much of his writing is on the theme of same-sex love. His books include The Joy of Gay Sex, written with Charles Silverstein (1977); his trilogy of semi-autobiographic novels, A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997); and his biography of Jean Genet.

Early life[]

Edmund Valentine White was born on January 13, 1940, in Cincinnati, Ohio. White mostly grew up in Chicago, Illinois.[1] He attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, as a boy. Afterward, he studied Chinese at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1962.[1]

Incestuous feelings colored his early family life. His mother, for instance, was sexually attracted to him.[2] White, moreover, spoke of his own attraction to his father: "I think with my father he was somebody who every eye in the family was focused on and he was a sort of a tyrant and nice-looking, the source of all power, money, happiness, and he was implacable and difficult. He was always spoken of in sexual terms, in the sense he left our mother for a much younger woman who was very sexy but had nothing else going for her. He was a famous womanizer. And he slept with my sister!"[3] He has also stated: "Writing has always been my recourse when I've tried to make sense of my experience or when it's been very painful. When I was 15 years old, I wrote my first (unpublished) novel about being gay, at a time when there were no other gay novels. So I was really inventing a genre, and it was a way of administering a therapy to myself, I suppose."[4][5]

White was at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 when the Stonewall Uprising began.[6] He writes, "Ours may have been the first funny revolution. When someone shouted “Gay is good” in imitation of “Black is beautiful,” we all laughed; at that moment we went from seeing ourselves as a mental illness to thinking we were a minority."[7]

Literary career[]

White declined admission to Harvard University's Chinese doctoral program in favor of following a lover to New York, where he worked for eight years as a staffer at Time-Life Books and freelanced for Newsweek. After briefly relocating to Rome and then New York, he was briefly employed as an editor for the Saturday Review when the magazine was based in San Francisco in the early 1970s; after the magazine folded in 1973, White returned to New York to edit Horizon (a quarterly cultural journal) and freelance as a writer and editor for entities, including Time-Life and The New Republic.

White is gay and much of his work draws on his gay experience. His debut novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), set on an island, can be read as commenting on gay culture in a coded manner. The American/Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov called it "a marvelous book".[8] Written with psychotherapist Charles Silverstein, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) made him known to a wider readership. His next novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) was explicitly gay-themed and drew on his own life.[9]

From 1980 to 1981, White was a member of a gay writers' group, The Violet Quill, that met briefly during that period and included Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano. White's autobiographic works are frank and unapologetic about his promiscuity and his HIV-positive status.[10]

In 1980, he brought out States of Desire, a survey of some aspects of gay life in America. In 1982, he helped found the group Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City.[11] In the same year appeared White's best-known work, A Boy's Own Story — the first volume of an autobiographic-fiction series, continuing with The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997), describing stages in the life of a gay man from boyhood to middle age. Several characters in the latter novel are recognizably based on well-known people from White's New York-centered literary and artistic milieu.[12]

From 1983 to 1990 White lived in France. In 1984 in Paris he was involved in the foundation of the French HIV/AIDS organisation, AIDES. During this period, he brought out his novel, Caracole (1985), which centres on heterosexual relationships. After returning to America White maintained his interest in France and French literature, publishing Genet: a biography (1993), Our Paris: sketches from memory (1995), Marcel Proust (1998), The Flaneur: a stroll through the paradoxes of Paris (2000) and Rimbaud (2008).

White at the 2011 Brooklyn Book Festival

The novel The Married Man (2000) is gay-themed and draws on White's life. Fanny: A Fiction (2003) is a historical novel about novelist Frances Trollope and social reformer Frances Wright in early 19th-century America. White's 2006 play Terre Haute (produced in New York City in 2009) portrays discussions that take place when a prisoner, based on terrorist bomber Timothy McVeigh, is visited by a writer based on Gore Vidal. (In real life McVeigh and Vidal corresponded but did not meet.)

In 2005 White published his autobiography, My Lives — organised by theme rather than chronology — and in 2009 his memoir of New York life in the 1960s and 1970s, City Boy.

White has been influential as a literary and cultural critic, particularly on same-sex love and sexuality.[citation needed]

He is currently a professor of creative writing in Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts.[13] In June 2012, White was reported by his husband, Michael Carroll, to be making 'remarkable' recovery after suffering two strokes in previous months.[14]

He has received many awards and distinctions. Among these he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He received the inaugural Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 1989, and is also the namesake of the organization's Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.

In 2014, Edmund White was presented the Bonham Centre Award from The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto, for his contributions to the advancement and education of issues around sexual identification.[15]

Awards and honors[]

Works[]

Fiction[]

  • Forgetting Elena (1973)
  • Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) ISBN 9780312022631, OCLC 17953397
  • A Boy's Own Story (1982) ISBN 9781509813865, OCLC 952160890
  • Caracole (1985) ISBN 9780679764168, OCLC 490872532
  • The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)
  • Skinned Alive: Stories (1995)
  • The Farewell Symphony (1997)
  • The Married Man (2000)
  • Fanny: A Fiction (2003)
  • Chaos: A Novella and Stories (2007)
  • Hotel de Dream (2007)
  • Jack Holmes and His Friend (2012) ISBN 9781608197255, OCLC 877992500
  • Our Young Man (2016) ISBN 9781408858967, OCLC 1002723765
  • A Saint from Texas (2020) ISBN 9781635572551

Plays[]

Nonfiction[]

  • The Joy of Gay Sex, with Charles Silverstein (1977)
  • States of Desire (1980)
  • The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Politics and Sexuality 1969-1993 (1994) ISBN 9780679434757, OCLC 33488913
  • The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (2000)
  • Arts and Letters (2004) ISBN 9781573442480, OCLC 69485728
  • Sacred Monsters (2011)

Biography[]

  • Genet: A Biography (1993) ISBN 9780099450078, OCLC 61423716
  • Marcel Proust (1998) ISBN 9780143114987, OCLC 233547908
  • Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (2008) ISBN 9781843549710, OCLC 600721506

Memoir[]

  • Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (1995)
  • My Lives (2005)
  • City Boy (2009) ISBN 9781608192342, OCLC 667235827
  • Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris (2014) ISBN 9781620406335, OCLC 881092866
  • The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading (2018) ISBN 9781635571172

Anthologies[]

  • The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis, with Adam Mars-Jones (1987)
  • In Another Part of the Forest: : An Anthology of Gay Short Fiction (1994)
  • The Art of the Story (2000)
  • A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play (2001)

Articles[]

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b "Edmund White". Cranbrook Schools. Retrieved August 30, 2020.
  2. ^ "Edmund White: Who are you calling a Trollope?". Tim Teeman. August 23, 2003. Retrieved August 30, 2020.
  3. ^ Interview with Edmund White, David Shankbone, Wikinews, November 8, 2007.
  4. ^ "Steve Dow, Journalist". stevedow.com.au.
  5. ^ Dow, Steve (May 20, 2006). "The story of his lives". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved August 30, 2020.
  6. ^ "Edmund White on Stonewall, the 'Decisive Uprising' of Gay Liberation". Literary Hub. April 30, 2019. Retrieved August 10, 2021.
  7. ^ "How Stonewall felt – to someone who was there | Edmund White". the Guardian. June 19, 2019. Retrieved August 10, 2021.
  8. ^ Edmund White, City Boy, 2009. Archived September 26, 2015, at the Wayback Machine ("Gerald Clarke...had gone to Montreux to do an interview with Nabokov for Esquire, and followed the usual drill...On his last evening in Switzerland he confronted Nabokov over drinks: 'So whom do you like?' he asked—since the great man had so far only listed his dislikes and aversions. 'Edmund White' Nabokov responded. 'He wrote Forgetting Elena. It’s a marvelous book." He’d then gone on to list titles by John Updike and Delmore Schwartz (particularly the short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"), as well as Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy among a few others.")
  9. ^ Yohalem, John (December 10, 1978). "Apostrophes to a Dead Lover". The New York Times. Retrieved September 25, 2015.
  10. ^ Mascolini, Mark (August 2005). "AIDS, Arts and Responsibilities: An Interview With Edmund White". The Body. Retrieved June 22, 2014.
  11. ^ Wood, Gaby (January 3, 2010). "A walk on the wild side in 70s New York". The Guardian. London. Retrieved May 1, 2010.
  12. ^ Benfey, Christopher (September 14, 1997). "The Dead". The New York Times. Retrieved March 12, 2013.
  13. ^ "The Program in Creative Writing, Princeton University". princeton.edu. Archived from the original on March 5, 2008.
  14. ^ Reece, Phil. Washington Blade. "Edmund White's partner after stroke: 'his improvement is remarkable'". June 1, 2012. Retrieved May 16, 2013.
  15. ^ "The 2014 Bonham Centre Awards Gala celebrates Power of the Word on April 24, 2014, honouring authors and writers who have contributed to the public understanding of sexual diversity in Canada". pennantmediagroup.com.
  16. ^ "2018 PEN American Lifetime Career and Achievement Awards". PEN America. February 2017. Retrieved February 7, 2018.
  17. ^ "You searched for edmund white". PEN America. Retrieved August 30, 2020.
  18. ^ Jump up to: a b c d "Edmund White". www.albany.edu. Retrieved August 30, 2020.
  19. ^ "Stonewall Book Awards List". American Library Association. September 9, 2009. Retrieved November 18, 2020.
  20. ^ "Edmund White to receive Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters". Princeton University. Retrieved August 30, 2020.
  21. ^ "Person, Place, Thing". New York University Arts and Letters. Retrieved August 30, 2020.
  22. ^ "The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement". The Publishing Triangle. Retrieved August 30, 2020.

Further reading[]

External links[]

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