Edmund White | |
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Born | Edmund Valentine White III January 13, 1940 Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S. |
Occupation |
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Nationality | American |
Alma mater | University of Michigan Cranbrook School |
Period | 1970s–present |
Notable works |
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Notable awards | Guggenheim Fellowship 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography 1993 Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres 1993 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction 2018 |
Spouse | Michael Carroll |
Website | |
edmundwhite |
Edmund Valentine White III (born January 13, 1940) is an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and an essayist on literary and social topics. Since 1999 he has been a professor at Princeton University. France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
White's 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. Much of his writing is on the theme of same-sex love.
White has also written biographies of three French writers: Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He is the namesake of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, awarded annually by Publishing Triangle.
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. [2] 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!" [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 When I was 15 years old, I wrote my first (unpublished) novel about being gay, at a time when there were no other gay novels.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 present at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 when the Stonewall uprising began. [6] He later wrote, "Ours may have been the first funny revolution." [7] "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". [8]
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 identifies as gay and is also an atheist, though he was reared as a Christian Scientist. [2] [9] He discovered he was HIV-positive in 1985. [9] However, he is a "non-progressor", one of the small percentage of cases that have not led to AIDS. [2] He is in a long-term open relationship with the American writer Michael Carroll, [2] living with him from 1995 onward. [9] They married in November 2013. [10]
In June 2012, Carroll reported that White was making a "remarkable" recovery after suffering two strokes in previous months. [11] He has also had a heart attack. [12]
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 scepticism 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". [13]
His favorite living writers in the early 1970s were Vladimir Nabokov and Christopher Isherwood. [14]
White wrote books and plays while a youth, including one unpublished novel titled Mrs Morrigan. [2]
Much of White's work draws on his experience of being gay. His debut novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), set on an island, can be read as commenting on gay culture in a coded manner. [15] [16] The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov called it "a marvelous book". [14] Written with his psychotherapist [17] Charles Silverstein, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) made him known to a wider readership. [18] It is celebrated for its sex-positive tone. [19] His next novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) was explicitly gay-themed and drew on his own life. [20]
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. [21] White's autobiographic works are frank and unapologetic about his promiscuity and his HIV-positive status. [22]
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. [9] [23] 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. [24]
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. [9] 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). [9] In 1984 in Paris, shortly after discovering he was HIV-positive, White joined the French HIV/AIDS organisation, AIDES. [9] During this period, he brought out his novel, Caracole (1985), which centres on heterosexual relationships. [25] But he also maintained an interest in France and French literature, writing biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. [26] 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. [9]
White came back to the United States in 1997. [2] The Married Man, a novel published in 2000, is gay-themed and draws on White's life. [27] Fanny: A Fiction (2003) is a historical novel about novelist Frances Trollope and social reformer Frances Wright in early 19th-century America. [2] 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.) [28]
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. [13] [26]
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". [2]
From 1999 onwards, White became professor of creative writing in Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts. [9] [29]
White has received numerous awards and distinctions. Recipient of the inaugural Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 1989, [30] he is also the namesake of the organization's Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. [31]
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. [32]
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was an expatriate Russian and Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin, where he met his wife. He achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, where he began writing in English. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 and lived mostly on the East Coast before returning to Europe in 1961, where he settled in Montreux, Switzerland.
John Preston was an American author of gay erotica and an editor of gay nonfiction anthologies.
Edmund Wilson Jr. was an American writer, literary critic and journalist. He is widely regarded as one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century. Wilson began his career as a journalist, writing for publications such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He helped to edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County. He was a friend of many notable figures of the time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. His scheme for a Library of America series of national classic works came to fruition through the efforts of Jason Epstein after Wilson's death. He was a two-time winner of the National Book Award and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.
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Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
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Andrew Holleran is the pseudonym of Eric Garber, an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer, born on the island of Aruba. Most of his adult life has been spent in New York City, Washington, D.C., and a small town in Florida. He was a member of The Violet Quill, a gay writer's group that met in 1980 and 1981 and also included Robert Ferro, Edmund White and Felice Picano. Following the critical and financial success of his first novel Dancer from the Dance in 1978, he became a prominent author of post-Stonewall gay literature. Historically protective of his privacy, the author continues to use the pseudonym Andrew Holleran as a writer and public speaker.
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Evan Fallenberg is an American-born writer and translator residing in Israel. His debut novel Light Fell, published in 2008, won the Stonewall Book Award and the Edmund White Award, and was a shortlisted Lambda Literary Award nominee for Debut Fiction at the 21st Lambda Literary Awards. His second novel, When We Danced on Water, was published in 2011 by HarperPerennial, and his third, The Parting Gift, by Other Press in 2018. He has also published English translations of several Israeli writers, including Meir Shalev, Hanoch Levin, Ron Leshem and Batya Gur.
SJ Sindu is a genderqueer Sri Lankan American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, was released by Soho Press in June 2017, won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was named an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Her second novel, Blue-Skinned Gods, was released on November 17, 2021, also by Soho Press. Her second chapbook Dominant Genes, which won the 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition, is being released in February 2022 by Black Lawrence Press. Her middle-grade fantasy graphic novel, Shakti, is forthcoming from HarperCollins. Her work has been published in Brevity, The Normal School, The Los Angeles Review of Books, apt, Vinyl Poetry, PRISM International, VIDA, Black Girl Dangerous, rkvry quarterly, and elsewhere. Sindu was a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, holds an MA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She currently teaches Creative Writing at University of Toronto Scarborough.
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White isn't a religious or 'New Age-y' person and considers himself an atheist.
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.
In My Lives: An Autobiography (2005), White dug into his primary material with clinical savagery, examining his life not in chronological terms but by subjects, such as 'My Shrinks', 'My Hustlers' and so on.