Edmund White

Edmund White is an esteemed novelist and cultural critic. He is the author of some 25 books, including a biography of French writer Jean Genet for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award; a trilogy of autobiographical novels; a book about unconventional Paris, The Flaneur; a memoir about New York in the 1970s, City Boy; and brief lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud.

Edmund White is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters.

He teaches writing at Princeton and lives in New York City.


Articles by Edmund White

Friday April 8

City Boy

In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.

It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars.

,
Monday January 8

The Consolations of Art

No matter how strange Proust’s life might have been, it has been subsumed, as he hoped, into the radiant vision of it that he presented in his writing. Nevertheless, the intensely intimate, if not always personal, quality of Proust’s novel makes him more and more popular in this age of memoirs. Whereas other modernists—Stein, Joyce,