Edmund White

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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 (1977) (written with Charles Silverstein), his trio of 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 and education

Edmund Valentine White mostly grew up in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, as a boy. Afterward, he studied Chinese at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1962.

Incestuous feelings colored his early family life. White stated that his mother, for instance, was sexually attracted to him. He, 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!" 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 When I was 15 years old, I wrote my first (unpublished) novel about being gay, at a time when there were no other gay novels.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."

White was present at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 when the Stonewall uprising began. He later wrote, "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".

White declined admission to Harvard University's Chinese doctoral program in favor of following a lover to New York. There he freelanched for Newsweek and spent seven years working as a staffer at Time-Life Books. After briefly relocating to Rome, San Francisco, and then returning to 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.

Personal life

White identifies as gay and is also an atheist, though he was reared as a Christian Scientist. He discovered he was HIV-positive in 1985. However, he is a "non-progressor", one of the small percentage of cases that have not led to AIDS. He is in a long-term open relationship with the American writer Michael Carroll, living with him from 1995 onward.

In June 2012, Carroll reported that White was making a "remarkable" recovery after suffering two strokes in previous months. He has also had a heart attack.

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Literary career

As a youth, White wrote books and plays, including one that was unpublished called Mrs Morrigan.

White's book is based on his experience of being gay. Forgetting Elena (1973), Elena's debut book set on an island, can be read as a coded commentary on gay culture. "Amazing book" is Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian-American novelist, called it "a marvelous book." The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), written with his psychotherapist Charles Silverstein, made him known to a larger audience. It is praised for its sex-positive tone. Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978), his next book, was explicitly gay-themed and drew on his own life.

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

He took out States of Desire, a study of some aspects of gay life in America, in 1980. In 1982, he helped found the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City. A Boy's Own Story, White's first volume of an autobiographic-fiction series, continues with The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997), a gay man's first book in the course of his life from boyhood to middle age. Several characters in the latter book are identified as being based on well-known people from White's New York-centered literary and artistic milieu.

White lived in France from 1983 to 1990. He went to Paris for one year as a writer with the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983, but "with its drizzle, as cool, grey, and luxurious as chinchilla," (as he wrote it in his autobiographical book The Farewell Symphony) he stayed there longer. Michel Foucault, a French philosopher, invited him for dinner on several occasions, though White denied White's concerns about HIV/AIDS (Foucault died of the disease shortly afterward). White joined the French HIV/AIDS group, AIDES, in 1984 in Paris, shortly after learning he was HIV-positive. He wrote Caracole (1985), which is based on heterosexual relationships, during this period. However, he maintained an interest in French and French literature, as well as writing biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. Genet: A biography (1993), A.S. Genet: a biography (1993), Our Paris: sketches from memory (1995), Marcel Proust (1998), The Flaneur: a stroll through Paris's paradoxes (1999) and Rimbaud (2008). Genet's biographer, Richard Burton, spent seven years researching the biography.

In 1997, White returned to the United States. The Married Man, a book that was published in 2000, is gay-themed and focuses on White's life. In early 19th-century America, Fanny: A Fiction (2003) is a historical book about novelist Frances Trollope and social activist Frances Wright. Terre Haute, White's 2006 play Terre Haute (which was released in New York City in 2009), portrays scenes 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)

White's autobiography, My Lives, was released in 2005 — arranged by theme rather than chronology — and his book City Boy, a 1960s and 1970s memoir.

Stephen Barber's biography of White himself. Barber "had a very romantic picture of me," his book says. It was very flattering. I was painted as a brooding figure by my father. I find myself becoming more self-mocking and satirical. I just skimmed that biography. I didn't want to end up resembling myself, as Genet put it.

White became a professor of creative writing in Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Performing Arts from 1999 to 2009.

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