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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
What Happened to Edmund White? ‘A Boy's Own Story' Author Passes Away
The death of Edmund White, acclaimed author of A Boy's Own Story, has shocked many. Widely recognized for his groundbreaking contributions to gay fiction and memoirs, White was a major figure in LGBTQ+ literature for decades. His death has led to an outpouring of tributes from fans and the literary world. Here are more details about Edmund White's death. Edmund White, the acclaimed American author who helped redefine gay literature, has died at the age of 85. According to his agent Bill Clegg, White passed away on Tuesday evening while waiting for an ambulance after suffering symptoms related to a stomach illness. White became a leading voice in LGBTQ+ literature beginning in the 1970s. He was best known for his 1982 novel A Boy's Own Story, which reflected his own experience growing up gay in mid-20th-century America. It was the first in a semi-autobiographical trilogy that also includes The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony. Born in Ohio in 1940 and raised in Illinois, White initially planned to attend Harvard but chose the University of Michigan so he could stay close to a therapist who claimed he could 'cure' homosexuality. He went on to live in New York and San Francisco, building a career in freelance journalism and magazine editing before publishing his debut novel, Forgetting Elena, in 1973. (via The Guardian) Over the years, White published more than 30 works. These include memoirs, essays, and biographies of literary figures like Jean Genet and Marcel Proust. His final memoir, The Loves of My Life, was released in 2025. White's husband, Michael Carroll, remembered him as kind, generous, and wise. He said, 'He was wise enough to be kind nearly always. He was generally beyond exasperation and was generous. I keep thinking of something to tell him before I remember.' The post What Happened to Edmund White? 'A Boy's Own Story' Author Passes Away appeared first on - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Edmund White, a groundbreaking gay author, dies at 85
NEW YORK — Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty,' has died. He was 85. White's death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg. Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in New York's Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the recent backlash. A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. 'A Boy's Own Story' was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature's commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet, along with books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates. 'Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,' cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in the New York Times in 1995. 'A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.' White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but at age 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was a psychologist. Feeling trapped and at times suicidal, White sought escape through the stories of others, including Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice' and a biography of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. 'As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,' he wrote in the 1991 essay 'Out of the Closet, on to the Bookshelf.' As he wrote in 'A Boy's Own Story,' he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be 'normal.' Even as he secretly wrote a 'coming out' novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from 'A Boy's Own Story' told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection. 'For the next few months I grieved,' White writes. 'I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?' Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would head out to bars. A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had a crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and 'all hell broke loose.' 'Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,' wrote White, who soon joined the protests. 'Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.' White's debut novel, the surreal and suggestive 'Forgetting Elena,' was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on 'The Joy of Gay Sex,' a follow-up to the bestselling 'The Joy of Sex' that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, 'Nocturnes for the King of Naples,' was released and he followed with the nonfiction 'States of Desire,' his attempt to show 'the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren't just hairdressers, they're also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.' His other works included 'Skinned Alive: Stories' and the novel 'A Previous Life,' in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published 'City Boy,' a memoir of New York in the 1960s and '70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels 'Jack Holmes & His Friend' and the memoir 'Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.' 'From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,' he told the Guardian around the time 'Jack Holmes' was released. 'It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.' Italie writes for the Associated Press.
Irish Examiner
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Groundbreaking gay author Edmund White dies at 85
Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty, has died. He was 85. White's death was confirmed on Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg, who did not immediately provide additional details. Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement, and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of Aids, the advance of gay rights and culture and the backlash of recent years. A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. Author Edmund White at his home in New York in 2019 (Mary Altaffer/AP) A Boy's Own Story was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature's commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet and books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates. He was an encyclopaedic reader who absorbed literature worldwide while returning yearly to such favourites as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Henry Green's Nothing. 'Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,' cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The New York Times in 1995. 'A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.' In early 1982, just as the public was learning about Aids, White was among the founders of Gay Men's Health Crisis, which advocated Aids prevention and education. The author himself would learn that he was HIV-positive in 1985, and would remember friends afraid to be kissed by him, even on the cheek, and parents who did not want him to touch their babies. White survived, but watched countless peers and loved ones die. Out of the seven gay men, including White, who formed the influential writing group the Violet Quill, four died of complications from Aids. As White wrote in his elegiac novel The Farewell Symphony, the story followed a shocking arc: 'Oppressed in the fifties, freed in the sixties, exalted in the seventies and wiped out in the eighties.' Your characters don't need to inhabit a ghetto any more than you do. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people But in the 1990s he lived to see gay people granted the right to marry and serve in the military, to see gay-themed books taught in schools and to see gay writers so widely published that they no longer needed to write about gay lives. 'We're in this post-gay period where you can announce to everybody that you yourself are gay, and you can write books in which there are gay characters, but you don't need to write exclusively about that,' he said in a Salon interview in 2009. 'Your characters don't need to inhabit a ghetto any more than you do. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.' In 2019, White received a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an honour previously given to Morrison and Philip Roth among others. 'To go from the most maligned to a highly lauded writer in a half-century is astonishing,' White said during his acceptance speech. White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but age at seven moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer, his mother a psychologist 'given to rages or fits of weeping'. Trapped in 'the closed, snivelling, resentful world of childhood,' at times suicidal, White was at the same time a 'fierce little autodidact' who sought escape through the stories of others, whether Thomas Mann's Death In Venice or a biography of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. 'As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,' he wrote in the essay Out Of The Closet, On To The Bookshelf, published in 1991. Even as he secretly wrote a 'coming out' novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. Edmund White was one of the leading gay American authors (Mary Altaffer/AP) After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese, he moved to New York in the early 1960s and worked for years as a writer for Time-Life Books and an editor for The Saturday Review. He would interview Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote among others, and, for some assignments, was joined by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Socially, he met William S Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood and John Ashbery. He remembered drinking espresso with an ambitious singer named Naomi Cohen, whom the world would soon know as 'Mama Cass' of the Mamas and Papas. He feuded with Kramer, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, an early supporter who withdrew a blurb for 'A Boy's Own Story' after he caricatured her in the novel Caracole. 'In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who'd helped me and befriended me,' he later wrote. Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would 'dress as a hippie, and head out for the bars'. A favourite stop was the Stonewall and he was in the neighbourhood on the night of June 28 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and 'all hell broke loose.' 'Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,' wrote White, who soon joined the protests. 'Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.' His works included Skinned Alive: Stories and the novel A Previous Life, in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published City Boy, a memoir of New York in the 1960s and 1970s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. 'From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,' he told The Guardian. 'It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature – the holy book. 'There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.'
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Edmund White, Novelist and Pioneer of Gay Literature, Dies at 85
Edmund White, who became a pioneer in gay literature by mining his own varied catalog of sexual experiences in more than 30 books and hundreds of articles and essays, died on Tuesday. He was 85. Mr. White died of natural causes, his agent, Bill Clegg, said in an email on Wednesday. Mr. White, who had been H.I.V. positive since the 1980s, survived two major strokes in 2012 and a heart attack in 2014. Many of Mr. White's novels, short story collections and works of nonfiction were critical successes, and several were best-sellers. The New York Times called 'Forgetting Elena' (1973), about the rituals of gay life on a fictionalized Fire Island, 'an astonishing first novel, obsessively fussy, and yet uncannily beautiful.' His second novel, 'Nocturnes for the King of Naples' (1978), took the form of letters from a young gay man to his deceased ex-lover. 'A Boy's Own Story' (1982), a tale of coming out set in the 1950s, was narrated by a teenager who bore more than a passing resemblance to a young Mr. White. His other semi-autobiographical novels, 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty' (1988) and 'The Farewell Symphony' (1997), follow the same unnamed protagonist into adulthood during the 1960s, then through the horrors of AIDSas he approaches middle age. His nonfiction works included several memoirs. 'My Lives' (2005), one of his best-reviewed books, chronicles his first 65 years in chapter titles that include 'My Shrinks,' 'My Hustlers' and 'My Blonds.' He zeroed in on his life in 1960s and 70s New York with 'City Boy' (2009), and on his time away from New York with 'Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris' (2014). He also wrote biographies of the French authors Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. Over the seven years that Mr. White spent researching and writing 'Genet' (1994), he traveled extensively, visiting the haunts of his peripatetic subject. His frequent companion was Hubert Sorin, a young French architect whom he called 'the love of my life' and who died of AIDS in 1994. The 'Joy of Gay Sex' (1977), a how-to based on the 1972 best seller 'The Joy of Sex,' was a groundbreaking effort that became somewhat obsolete once fears of H.I.V. made safe sex far more common. Its co-author was Charles Silverstein, a psychologist who had been treating Mr. White when a publisher suggested they collaborate, not knowing they were already acquainted. He is survived by his husband, Michael Carroll, according to Mr. Clegg, his agent. A complete obituary will follow. Alex Marshall contributed reporting.
