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Edmund White

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For the English cricketer, seeEdmund White (cricketer).
Not to be confused withE. B. White.

Edmund White
Photograph by David Shankbone
Photograph byDavid Shankbone
BornEdmund Valentine White III
(1940-01-13)January 13, 1940(age 84)
Cincinnati,Ohio, U.S.
Occupation
  • Novelist
  • short story writer
  • non-fiction writer
Alma materUniversity of Michigan
Cranbrook School
Period1970s–present
Notable works
Notable awardsGuggenheim 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
SpouseMichael 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.

White's books includeForgetting Elena(1973), described byVladimir Nabokovas '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) andThe Farewell Symphony(1997). In addition, he has written biographies of the French writers:Genet,ProustandRimbaud.

Since 1999 he has been a professor atPrinceton University.An annual prize given byPublishing Triangleis theEdmund White Awardfor Debut Fiction. France made himChevalier(and laterOfficier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettresin 1993.

Early life and education

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Edmund Valentine White mostly grew up in Chicago, Illinois.[1]He attendedCranbrook SchoolinBloomfield Hills, Michigan,as a boy. Afterward, he studied Chinese at theUniversity 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 declined admission toHarvard University's Chinesedoctoral programin favor of following a lover to New York. There he freelanced forNewsweekand spent seven years working as a staffer atTime-Life Books.[1]After briefly relocating toRome,San Francisco, and then returning to New York, he was briefly employed as an editor for theSaturday Reviewwhen the magazine was based in San Francisco in the early 1970s; after the magazine folded in 1973, White returned to New York to editHorizon(a quarterly cultural journal) and freelance as a writer and editor for entities such as Time-Life andThe New Republic.[1]

Literary career

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White wrote books and plays while a youth, including one unpublished novel titledMrs Morrigan.[2]

White's debut novel,Forgetting Elena(1973), set on an island, can be read as commenting on gay culture in a coded manner.[6][7]TheRussian-AmericannovelistVladimir Nabokovcalled it "a marvelous book".[8]Written with his psychotherapist[9]Charles Silverstein,The Joy of Gay Sex(1977) made him known to a wider readership.[10]It is celebrated for its sex-positive tone.[11]His next novel,Nocturnes for the King of Naples(1978) was explicitly gay-themed and drew on his own life.[12]

From 1980 to 1981, White was a member of a gay writers' group,The Violet Quill,which met briefly during that period, and includedAndrew HolleranandFelice Picano.[13]White's autobiographic works are frank and unapologetic about his promiscuity and his HIV-positive status.[14]

In 1980, White brought outStates of Desire,a survey of some aspects of gay life in America. In 1982, he helped found the groupGay Men's Health Crisisin New York City.[15][16]In the same year appeared White's best-known work,A Boy's Own Story— the first volume of an autobiographic-fiction series, continuing withThe Beautiful Room Is Empty(1988) andThe 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.[17]

From 1983 to 1990 White lived in France. He moved there initially for one year in 1983 via theGuggenheim Fellowshipfor 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 novelThe Farewell Symphony) that he stayed there for longer.[15]French philosopherMichel Foucaultinvited him for dinner on several occasions, though he dismissed White's concerns aboutHIV/AIDS(Foucault would die of the illness shortly afterward).[15]In 1984 in Paris, shortly after discovering he was HIV-positive, White joined the French HIV/AIDS organization,AIDES.[15]During this period, he brought out his novel,Caracole(1985), which centers on heterosexual relationships.[18]But he also maintained an interest in France and French literature, writing biographies ofJean Genet,Marcel ProustandArthur Rimbaud.[19]He publishedGenet: a biography(1993),Our Paris: sketches from memory(1995),Marcel Proust(1998),The Flaneur: a stroll through the paradoxes of Paris(2000) andRimbaud(2008). He spent seven years writing the biography of Genet.[15]

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.[20]Fanny: A Fiction(2003) is a historical novel about novelistFrances Trollopeand social reformerFrances Wrightin early 19th-century America.[2]White's 2006 playTerre Haute(produced in New York City in 2009) portrays discussions that take place when a prisoner, based on terrorist bomberTimothy McVeigh,is visited by a writer based onGore Vidal.(In real life McVeigh and Vidal corresponded but did not meet.)[21]

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.[22][19]

White himself was the subject of a biography byStephen 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. AsGenetput it, I didn't want to end up resembling myself ".[2]

From 1999 onwards, White became professor of creative writing inPrinceton University's Lewis Center for the Arts.[15][23]

Awards and honors

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White has received numerous awards and distinctions. Recipient of the inaugural Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 1989,[24]he is also the namesake of the organization'sEdmund White Awardfor Debut Fiction.[25]

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.[26]

Influences

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In his 2005 memoirMy Lives,White citesJean Genet,Marcel ProustandAndré Gideas 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".[22]

His favorite living writers in the early 1970s wereVladimir NabokovandChristopher Isherwood.[8]

Works

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Fiction

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  • Forgetting Elena(1973)ISBN978-0345358622
  • Nocturnes for the King of Naples(1978)ISBN9780312022631,OCLC17953397
  • A Boy's Own Story(1982)ISBN9781509813865,OCLC952160890
  • Caracole(1985)ISBN9780679764168,OCLC490872532
  • The Beautiful Room Is Empty(1988)ISBN9780679755401
  • Skinned Alive: Stories(1995)ISBN9780679754756
  • The Farewell Symphony(1997)ISBN978-0701136215
  • The Married Man(2000)ISBN978-0679781448
  • Fanny: A Fiction(2003)ISBN978-0701169718
  • Chaos: A Novella and Stories(2007)ISBN9780786720057
  • Hotel de Dream(2007)ISBN978-0060852252
  • Jack Holmes and His Friend(2012)ISBN9781608197255,OCLC877992500
  • Our Young Man(2016)ISBN9781408858967,OCLC1002723765
  • A Saint from Texas(2020)ISBN9781635572551
  • A Previous Life(2022)ISBN9781526632241[41]
  • The Humble Lover(2023)ISBN9781639730889

Plays

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Nonfiction

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Biography

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Memoir

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Anthologies

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Articles

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  • White, Edmund. "My Women. Learning how to love them",The New Yorker,June 13, 2005. Autobiographical article excerpted fromMy Lives.

Personal life

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White was present at theStonewall Innin 1969 when theStonewall uprisingbegan.[42]He later wrote, "Ours may have been the firstfunnyrevolution. "[43]"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".[44]

White identifies as gay and is also anatheist,though he was reared as aChristian Scientist.[2][15]He discovered he was HIV-positive in 1985.[15]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-termopen relationshipwith the American writerMichael Carroll,[2]living with him from 1995 onward.[15]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 withColm Tóibín,White stated that he previously dated writerTony Heilbut.[48]

See also

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References

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  1. ^abcd"Edmund White".Cranbrook Schools.RetrievedAugust 30,2020.
  2. ^abcdefgh"Edmund White: Who are you calling a Trollope?".Tim Teeman.August 23, 2003.RetrievedAugust 30,2020.
  3. ^Interview with Edmund White,David Shankbone,Wikinews,November 8, 2007.
  4. ^"Steve Dow, Journalist".stevedow.au.
  5. ^Dow, Steve (May 20, 2006)."The story of his lives".The Sydney Morning Herald.RetrievedAugust 30,2020.
  6. ^"Review: Forgetting Elena".August 7, 2020.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.
  7. ^White, Edmund (1984).Forgetting Elena; and, Nocturnes for the King of Naples.Pan Books.ISBN9780330283748.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.
  8. ^abWhite, Edmund (2009)."How did one edit Nabokov?".City Boy.Archived fromthe originalon September 26, 2015.Gerald Clarke...had gone to Montreux to do an interview with Nabokov forEsquire,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 wroteForgetting Elena.It's a marvelous book. "He'd then gone on to list titles byJohn UpdikeandDelmore Schwartz(particularly the short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" ), as well as Robbe-Grillet'sJealousyamong a few others.
  9. ^Altmann, Jennifer (July–August 2021)."Trailblazer in Gay Lit"(PDF).Princeton Alumni Weekly.RetrievedSeptember 18,2021.
  10. ^"'The Joy of Gay Sex' Is 44 Years Old. Let's Celebrate Its Provocative Illustrations ".Hornet. July 26, 2021.RetrievedAugust 12,2021.
  11. ^Hoffman, Wayne (October 17, 2017)."Why The Joy of Gay Sex Still Has Much to Teach Readers, 40 Years Later".Slate.RetrievedAugust 12,2021.
  12. ^Yohalem, John (December 10, 1978)."Apostrophes to a Dead Lover".The New York Times.RetrievedSeptember 25,2015.
  13. ^Summers, Claude J."The Violet Quill".The GLBTQ encyclopedia. Archived fromthe originalon September 26, 2007.
  14. ^Mascolini, Mark (August 2005)."AIDS, Arts and Responsibilities: An Interview With Edmund White".The Body.RetrievedJune 22,2014.
  15. ^abcdefghijkLandau, Elizabeth (May 25, 2011)."HIV in the '80s: 'People didn't want to kiss you on the cheek'".CNN.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.White isn't a religious or 'New Age-y' person and considers himself an atheist.
  16. ^Wood, Gaby (January 3, 2010)."A walk on the wild side in 70s New York".The Guardian.RetrievedMay 1,2010.
  17. ^Benfey, Christopher (September 14, 1997)."The Dead".The New York Times.RetrievedMarch 12,2013.
  18. ^"Caracole by Edmund White".September 18, 1985.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.
  19. ^abParini, Jay (January 16, 2010)."City Boy by Edmund White, and Chaos by Edmund White".The Guardian.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.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.
  20. ^Aletti, Vince (May 23, 2000)."Amour No More".The Village Voice.New York.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.
  21. ^Lovendusky, Eugene (April 11, 2007)."Review: White's 'Terre Haute' Haunts".BroadwayWorld.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.
  22. ^abCartwight, Justin (September 25, 2005)."My Lives by Edmund White".The Independent.London.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.
  23. ^"The Program in Creative Writing, Princeton University".Princeton University. Archived fromthe originalon March 5, 2008.
  24. ^ab"The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement".Publishing Triangle.RetrievedAugust 30,2020.
  25. ^"Awards".
  26. ^"The 2014 Bonham Centre Awards Gala celebrates Power of the Word on April 24, 2014, honouring authors and writers who have contributed to the public understanding of sexual diversity in Canada".pennantmediagroup.
  27. ^abcd"Edmund White".Albany.edu.RetrievedAugust 30,2020.
  28. ^"4th Annual Lambda Literary Awards".July 13, 1992.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.
  29. ^"Edmund White Delivers Kessler Lecture – CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies".RetrievedMay 15,2022.
  30. ^"Person, Place, Thing".New York University Arts and Letters.RetrievedAugust 30,2020.
  31. ^"1994 Pulitzer Prizes".RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.
  32. ^"6th Annual Lambda Literary Awards".July 13, 1994.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.
  33. ^"Edmund White to receive Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters".Princeton University.RetrievedAugust 30,2020.
  34. ^Cerna, Antonio Gonzalez (July 14, 1996)."8th Annual Lambda Literary Awards".Archived fromthe originalon March 4, 2012.
  35. ^"10th Annual Lambda Literary Awards".July 14, 1998.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.
  36. ^"13th Annual Lambda Literary Awards".July 9, 2002.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.
  37. ^"Stonewall Book Awards List".American Library Association.September 9, 2009.RetrievedNovember 18,2020.
  38. ^"2018 PEN American Lifetime Career and Achievement Awards".PEN America. February 2017.RetrievedFebruary 7,2018.
  39. ^"You searched for edmund white".PEN America.RetrievedAugust 30,2020.
  40. ^"NBF to Present Lifetime Achievement Award to Pioneering Writer Edmund White".National Book Foundation. September 2019.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.
  41. ^"A Previous Life".Bloomsbury.Archived fromthe originalon January 26, 2022.RetrievedJanuary 26,2022.
  42. ^"Edmund White on Stonewall, the 'Decisive Uprising' of Gay Liberation".Literary Hub. April 30, 2019.RetrievedAugust 10,2021.
  43. ^White, Edmund (June 19, 2019)."How Stonewall felt – to someone who was there".The Guardian.RetrievedAugust 10,2021.
  44. ^White, Edmund (1988).The Beautiful Room is Empty.Vintage International. p. 226.ISBN0-679-75540-3.
  45. ^"Q&A With Edmund White".The Nation.March 27, 2014.RetrievedJuly 1,2023.
  46. ^Reece, Phil (June 1, 2012)."Edmund White's partner after stroke: 'his improvement is remarkable'".Washington Balde.RetrievedMay 16,2013.
  47. ^"Living With Edmund White".The New York Times.July 24, 2020.RetrievedSeptember 28,2022.
  48. ^Santa Maddalena Foundation (June 1, 2023).Colm Tóibín (Il mago) in conversazione con Edmund White.RetrievedMay 30,2024– via YouTube.

Further reading

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