Edmund Valentine White III (born January 13, 1940) is a novelist, short-story writer and critic. He is also currently a fiction writing teacher and the director of creative writing at Princeton University.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he largely grew up in Chicago and later worked in New York as a journalist. As a boy, White attended the prestigious Cranbrook-Kingswood Upper School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and studied Chinese at the University of Michigan. From 1983 to 1990 he lived in France. His best-known work is perhaps A Boy's Own Story, the first volume of an autobiographical-fiction trilogy 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. Most of his fictional work is set in a contemporary gay milieu, although his later work draws on a broader range of themes. He has also been influential as a literary and cultural critic, particularly on gay issues, and has been open in his discussion of his HIV-positive status for two decades. He recently published an autobiography entitled My Lives, at the age of sixty-five.

Works

Fiction

• Forgetting Elena (1973)
• Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978)
• A Boy's Own Story (1982)
• Caracole (1985)
• The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)
• The Farewell Symphony (1998)
• The Married Man (2000)
• Fanny: A Fiction (2003)

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

• Jean Genet (1993)
• Marcel Proust (1998)

Memoir

• Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (1995)
• My Lives (2006)

Anthologies

• The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis (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

• Morton, Paul. (April 6, 2006) "Interview: Edmund White."EconoCulture Retrieved April 29, 2006
• Edmund White: My Women. Learning how to love them The New Yorker June 13, 2005. Autobiographical article

See also

• His "A Boy's Own Story" is referred to in Queer As Folk (U.S.) Episode 4.10. Ben Brucker discusses an offscreen White reading with student Anthony.
• Pedophilia and child sexual abuse in fiction

External links

• Official website
• Audio interviews by Don Swaim

1940 births | Living people | American novelists | Gay writers | Members of The American Academy of Arts and Letters

Edmund White | Edmund White