Edmund White

Edmund White is an American novelist, memoirist, and biographer, widely regarded as one of the founding figures of modern gay literature. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1940, he studied Chinese at the University of Michigan and has lived for extended periods in both New York and Paris. He is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. White's autobiographical trilogy—A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1997)—charts the arc of a gay American life from the closeted 1950s through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s with extraordinary precision and lyrical beauty. His other major works include States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), the biography Marcel Proust (1999), and the memoir City Boy (2009). He is also the author of the acclaimed biography Jean Genet (1993), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. White received the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2019, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award, among many other honours. He has been a central figure in American LGBTQ letters for more than five decades.