| Edmund White | |
| Birth Name: | Edmund Valentine White III |
| Birth Date: | 13 January 1940 |
| Birth Place: | Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S. |
| Alma Mater: | University of Michigan Cranbrook School |
| Period: | 1970s–present |
| Spouse: | Michael Carroll |
Edmund Valentine White III (born January 13, 1940) is an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and an essayist on literary and social topics.
White's books include Forgetting Elena (1973), described by Vladimir Nabokov as 'marvelous'; Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978); States of Desire (1980); and his trilogy of semi-autobiographic novels, A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997). In addition, he has written biographies of the French writers: Genet, Proust and Rimbaud.
Since 1999 he has been a professor at Princeton University. An annual prize given by Publishing Triangle is the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. France made him French: Chevalier|italic=no (and later French: Officier|italic=no) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
Edmund Valentine 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. 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!"[2] 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 When I was 15 years old, I wrote my first (unpublished) novel about being gay, at a time when there were no other gay novels.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."[3] [4]
White declined admission to Harvard University's Chinese doctoral program in favor of following a lover to New York. There he freelanced for Newsweek and spent seven years working as a staffer at Time-Life Books.[1] 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 such as Time-Life and The New Republic.[1]
White wrote books and plays while a youth, including one unpublished novel titled Mrs Morrigan.
White's debut novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), set on an island, can be read as commenting on gay culture in a coded manner.[5] [6] The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov called it "a marvelous book".[7] Written with his psychotherapist[8] Charles Silverstein, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) made him known to a wider readership.[9] It is celebrated for its sex-positive tone.[10] His next novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) was explicitly gay-themed and drew on his own life.[11]
From 1980 to 1981, White was a member of a gay writers' group, The Violet Quill, which met briefly during that period, and included Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano.[12] White's autobiographic works are frank and unapologetic about his promiscuity and his HIV-positive status.[13]
In 1980, White 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.[14] 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.[15]
From 1983 to 1990 White lived in France. He moved there initially for one year in 1983 via the Guggenheim Fellowship for writing he had received, but took such a liking to Paris "with its drizzle, as cool, grey and luxurious as chinchilla," (as he described it in his autobiographical novel The Farewell Symphony) that he stayed there for longer. French philosopher Michel Foucault invited him for dinner on several occasions, though he dismissed White's concerns about HIV/AIDS (Foucault would die of the illness shortly afterward). In 1984 in Paris, shortly after discovering he was HIV-positive, White joined the French HIV/AIDS organization, AIDES. During this period, he brought out his novel, Caracole (1985), which centers on heterosexual relationships.[16] But he also maintained an interest in France and French literature, writing biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He published 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). He spent seven years writing the biography of Genet.
White came back to the United States in 1997. The Married Man, a novel published in 2000, is gay-themed and draws on White's life.[17] Fanny: A Fiction (2003) is a historical novel about novelist Frances Trollope and social reformer Frances Wright in early 19th-century America.[18] 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.)[19]
In 2005 White published his autobiography, My Lives — organized by theme rather than chronology – and in 2009 his memoir of New York life in the 1960s and 1970s, City Boy.[20] [21]
White himself was the subject of a biography by Stephen Barber. His response to the book was that Barber "had a very romantic vision of me. It was very flattering. He painted me as a brooding figure. I see myself as much more self-mocking and satirical. I just skimmed that biography. As Genet put it, I didn't want to end up resembling myself".[18]
From 1999 onwards, White became professor of creative writing in Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts.[22]
White has received numerous awards and distinctions. Recipient of the inaugural Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 1989, he is also the namesake of the organization's Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.[23]
In 2014, Edmund White was presented with 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.[24]
In his 2005 memoir My Lives, White cites Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and André Gide as influences, writing: "they convinced me that homosexuality was crucial to the development of the modern novel because it led to a resurrection of love, a profound skepticism about the naturalness of gender roles and a revival of the classical tradition of same-sex love that dominated Western poetry and prose until the birth of Christ".[20]
His favorite living writers in the early 1970s were Vladimir Nabokov and Christopher Isherwood.[7]
White was present at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 when the Stonewall uprising began.[41] He later wrote, "Ours may have been the first funny revolution."[42] "When someone shouted 'Gay is good' in imitation of 'Black is beautiful', we all laughed... Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis".[43]
White identifies as gay and is also an atheist, though he was reared as a Christian Scientist.[18] He discovered he was HIV-positive in 1985.[44] However, he is a "non-progressor", one of the small percentage of cases that have not led to AIDS.[18] He is in a long-term open relationship with the American writer Michael Carroll,[18] living with him from 1995 onward.[44] They married in November 2013.[45]
In June 2012, Carroll reported that White was making a "remarkable" recovery after suffering two strokes in previous months.[46] He has also had a heart attack.[47]
In the 2023 interview with Colm Tóibín, White stated that he previously dated writer Tony Heilbut.[48]