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Edmund White © Andrew Fladeboe
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Edmund White (b. 1940 in Cincinnati, USA) is one of the most significant gay writers of the 20th Century. With other writers he founded the Violet Quill group in the early 1980s, which had a profound influence on gay literature in the USA. His book States of Desire (1980), a survey of gay life in the USA at the beginning of the gay liberation movement, attracted international attention for White.
As a novelist he is best known for his semi-autobiographical trilogy A Boy's Own Story (1992), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997). His novels and autobiographical books made him the literary chronicler of gay life in the USA.
When he was a cultural correspondent in Paris he also published internationally-respected biographies of Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud and Marcel Proust.
Since 1990 he has lived in New York and teaches at Princeton University and elsewhere. White has been awarded many prizes for his literary work, including the Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Book Critics Circle Award and in 2018 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.
Publications (selection):
The Joy of Gay Sex, with Charles Silverstein, Crown Publishing 1977, dt. Die Freuden der Schwulen.
Ein Handbuch zum Leben und Lieben, Gmünder 1989
States of Desire, Dutton Adul 1980, dt. Staaten der Sehnsucht, S. Fischer 1982
A Boy's Own Story, Modern Library 1982, dt. Selbstbildnis eines Jünglings, Kindler 1990
The Beautiful Room Is Empty, Knopf 1988), dt. Und das schöne Zimmer ist leer, Kindler 1991
The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Politics and Sexuality 1969-1993, Knopf 1994, dt. Die
brennende Bibliothek. Essays, Kindler 1996
The Farewell Symphony, Knopf, 1997, dt. Abschiedssymphonie, Kindler 2000
The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, Bloomsbury 2008
Hotel de Dream, Bloomsbury 2008, dt. Männerschwarm Verlag 2015
Jack Holmes and His Friend, Bloomsbury 2012, dt. Jack Holmes und sein Freund, Gmünder 2012
City Boy. My Life in New York during the 1960s and '70s, Bloomsbury 2009, dt. City Boy. Mein Leben
in New York, Albino Verlag 2015
Our Young Man, Bloomsbury 2016
The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading, Bloomsbury 2018