White, Edmund (Edmund Valentine White 3d), 1940-, American writer, b. Cincinnati, grad. Univ. of Michigan (B.A., 1962). White is one of the best known-and probably the finest stylist-of the openly gay writers who came to public attention in the 1970s and 80s, and he was a pioneer of the genre that has been called gay literature. His first novel,
Forgetting Elena (1973), the tale of a young amnesiac's struggle to reassemble his life, was highly stylized and linguistically inventive, as was
Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978). His later works concentrate on the struggles, pleasures, and political stances of members of contemporary America's middle-class male homosexual community. These themes are evident in a semiautobiographical trilogy of novels tracing the protagonist's realization of his sexuality and coming of age (
A Boy's Own Story, 1982), his troubled young manhood and political awakening (
The Beautiful Room Is Empty, 1988), and his middle age in an AIDS-ravaged city (
The Farewell Symphony, 1997). Among White's other works are the novels
The Married Man (2000),
Fanny (2003), and
Hotel de Dream (2007) and short stories, e.g., those in
Skinned Alive (1995). His nonfiction includes
The Joy of Gay Sex (1977, with C. Silverstein),
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), a major biography of Jean
Genet (1993), short biographies of Proust (1999) and Rimbaud (2008), a study of Paris entitled
The Flâneur (2001), and essays, e.g.,
Arts and Letters (2004).
Bibliography
See his autobiography, My Lives (2006) and his memoir, City Boy (2009); biography by S. Barber (1999).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.
