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Edmund White, acclaimed novelist and pioneer of queer literature, dies at 85
Edmund White, a pioneer of queer literature who broke ground with his semi-autobiographical novels chronicling gay life and the gay revolution, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
White's agent, Bill Clegg, confirmed his death to Entertainment Weekly, saying the author died of natural causes.
"Ed was a groundbreaking writer whose candid depictions of gay life reshaped American literature," Clegg said in a statement to EW. "As a novelist, critic, memoirist, and biographer, he expanded the boundaries of identity and desire on the page and in the culture. He was also a wickedly funny, deeply generous, brilliant man who was beloved by many. He will be much missed. "
White had been H.I.V. positive since the 1980s, and survived two major strokes in 2012 and a heart attack in 2014. Despite his medical scares, the author continued adding to his prolific literary catalogue well into his later years. His most recently published work, titled The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, was released in January 2025.
White was born in Cincinnati in 1940 and moved to the Chicago area with his mother when his parents divorced. He wrote books and plays even as a young child, although he didn't publish his first book until 1973, after he spent years as a journalist at various publications such as Newsweek, Time-Life Books, Saturday Review, and Horizon.
Starting with his debut novel, Forgetting Elena, White made his mark in the publishing world, writing honestly about the queer experience and chronicling the evolution of a community no longer afraid to declare and celebrate its existence. He wrote more than 30 fiction and nonfiction books, including notable novels like A Boy's Own Story and The Married Man, which drew from his life, and Fanny: A Fiction, a historical novel about the author Frances Trollope and social reformer Frances Wright. Several of his works were best-sellers. The Chicago Tribune once called him "the godfather of queer lit."
"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 also published five memoirs: 2009's My Lives in 2005; City Boy, about his life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s; 2014's Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris; 2018's The Unpunished Vice, about his tastes in literature; and The Loves of My Life.
He was the recipient of Lambda Literary's 2018 Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2018. France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
White taught at Brown University and became a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. In early 1982, shortly before he was diagnosed as H.I.V. positive, White cofounded and served as the inaugural president of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, a collective care unit aimed at advocacy amid the AIDS epidemic. He moved to France the following year, eventually returning to the U.S. in the late '90s.
White is survived by his husband, Michael Carroll, whom he married in 2013, and his older sister, Margaret Fleming.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
