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Edmund White

 
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Edmund White
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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. 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 (coauthor, 1977), States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), a monumental biography of Jean Genet (1993), short biographies of Proust (1999) and Rimbaud (2008), and a study of Paris entitled The Flâneur (2001).

Bibliography

See his autobiography, My Lives (2006); biography by S. Barber (1999).

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Works: Works by Edmund White
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(b. 1940)

1978Nocturnes from the King of Naples. After a well-received first novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), a social satire that can be read as a allegory of gay life, White's second novel deals explicitly with homosexuality as the narrator reviews his relationship with his lover.
1982A Boy's Own Story. The great success of this autobiographical novel establishes its author as a key figure in gay literature. The novel's importance lies in its use of the conventions of the bildungsroman to tell the story of a boy's discovery of his gay orientation. It is as much a story about growing up as it is specifically about gay life.
1988The Beautiful Room Is Empty. In the sequel to A Boy's Own Story, White portrays his hero's college years and builds toward the climax of the novel--the Stonewall riots (1969), which initiated the gay rights movement and the development of gay literature as a separate area of study. White himself had been radicalized by this event (he was there when police raided the Stonewall Inn and brutally arrested homosexuals), and the novel reflects much of his own experience.
1993Genet. The novelist's lengthy biography of the French novelist and playwright Jean Genet (1910-1986) is deemed by more than one critic to be definitive--perhaps even exhaustive. Despite its length and surfeit of detail, the biography is widely reviewed and wins numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.
1995Skinned Alive. This collection of tales about gay life at home and abroad is a series of what White has called "auto-fictions," which blur distinctions between autobiography and imagination.
1997The Farewell Symphony. This is the third and final installment of the autobiographical trilogy White had begun in 1982 with A Boy's Own Story and continued in The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988). In this novel--named for the work by Haydn in which the instrumentalists leave the stage one after another until only a single violin remains playing--the protagonist is left standing nearly alone in a world beset by AIDS.

Quotes By: Edmund White
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Quotes:

"The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War."

"I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having too much sex. At what point does a healthy amount become too much? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their case the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such. When morality is discussed I invariably discover, halfway into the conversation, that what is meant are not the great ethical questions but the rather dreary business of sexual habit, which to my mind is an aesthetic rather than an ethical issue."

Wikipedia: Edmund White
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Edmund White

Edmund Valentine White III (born January 13, 1940) is an American author and literary critic. He is a member of the faculty of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing.[1]

Contents

Life and work

Search Wikinews Wikinews has related news: Edmund White on writing, incest, life and Larry Kramer

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he largely grew up in Chicago. White attended the prestigious Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan as a boy, then studied Chinese at the University of Michigan. He later worked in New York as a journalist. From 1983 to 1990 he lived in France.

Incestuous feelings existed in White's family; his mother was attracted to him. White spoke of his own sexual attraction to his father in an interview: "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]

White's best-known work is A Boy's Own Story, the first volume of an autobiographical-fiction series that continued with The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, describing stages in the life of a gay man from boyhood to middle age. Several characters in these latter two novels are recognizably based on well-known individuals from White's New York-centered literary and artistic milieu. White was a member of The Violet Quill, a gay writer's group that met briefly from 1980-1981. The Violet Quill included other prolific gay writers like Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano.

An earlier novel Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) and a later novel The Married Man (2000) are also gay-themed and draw heavily on White's own life. In 2006 he published a nonfiction autobiography entitled My Lives. It is unusual in that it is organized by theme, rather than chronologically. White's autobiographical works are frank and unapologetic about his promiscuity and his HIV-positive status. In Paris, in 1984, he was closely involved in the foundation of the French HIV/AIDS NGO AIDES.

Though he is openly gay himself,[3] not all of his works centre on gay themes. His debut Forgetting Elena (1973) is set on an imaginary island. The novel can be read as commenting on gay culture, but only in a highly coded and indirect manner. Caracole (1985) centers on heterosexual characters, relationships, and desires. Fanny: A Fiction (2003) is a historical novel about Frances Trollope and Frances Wright. White's 2006 play Terre Haute (produced in New York City in 2009) portrays discussions that take place when a prisoner based on Timothy McVeigh is visited by a writer based on Gore Vidal. (In real life McVeigh and Vidal corresponded but did not meet.)

White has been influential as a literary and cultural critic, particularly on gay issues. He has received many awards and distinctions; among these, he is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Works

Fiction

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)
  • The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (2000)
  • Arts and Letters (2004)

Biography

  • Genet: A Biography (1993)
  • Marcel Proust (1998)
  • Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (2008)

Memoir

  • Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (1995)
  • My Lives (2005)
  • City Boy (2009)

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)

Further reading

References

  1. ^ The Program in Creative Writing, Princeton University
  2. ^ Interview with Edmund White, David Shankbone, Wikinews, November 8, 2007.
  3. ^ Schulman, Sarah (1997-09-16). "The White party - Edmund White's "The Farewell Symphony"". The Advocate. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1589/is_n742/ai_20139106. Retrieved 2007-06-24. 

External links


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Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Edmund White".  Read more