Edmund White was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, and memoirist. He wrote mainly in the genre of gay literature. He was best known for his semi-autobiographical novels, including A Boy’s Own Story (1982) and The Married Man (2000). White won the Lambda Literary Award (1988) and the National Book Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award (2019).
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1940, Edmund White grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He attended the Cranbrook School in Michigan. White was accepted to Harvard University but chose the University of Michigan to stay near his therapist. The therapist believed he could “cure” White’s homosexuality.
At the University of Michigan, White majored in Chinese. He later declined Harvard’s doctoral programme to follow a lover to New York City.
In New York, White worked as a freelance writer for Newsweek and spent seven years at Time-Life Books. He also edited the Saturday Review in San Francisco during the early 1970s.
After the magazine closed in 1973, he returned to New York to edit Horizon and continued to freelance for The New Republic and Time-Life. White’s debut novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), was praised by Vladimir Nabokov as “a marvellous book.”
White gained wider recognition with The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), co-written with his psychotherapist Charles Silverstein. White joked, “I think if I wrote it alone it would have been called The Tragedy of Gay Sex.” The book was celebrated for its positive tone on gay sexuality. White’s work often drew on his own life, especially his experiences as a gay man.
His best-known work, A Boy’s Own Story (1982), was the first of a trilogy that traced his life from youth to middle age. The series included The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997). White was a founding member of the Violet Quill, a group of gay writers active in the early 1980s.
Between 1983 and 1990, White lived in France. He befriended Michel Foucault and developed an interest in French literature. During this period, White wrote biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. His Genet biography (1993) won the Lambda Literary Award and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
White was diagnosed HIV positive in 1984. He said, “I kind of pulled the covers over my head and thought: ‘Oh gee, I’ll be dead in a year or two’ … it turned out that I was a slow progressor.” Despite this, he continued to write and teach. He taught at Brown University in the early 1990s and became a professor of creative writing at Princeton University in 1999.
Over his career, White published more than 30 books, including memoirs such as My Lives (2005) and City Boy (2009). His last memoir, The Loves of My Life (2025), reflected on his extensive sexual life.
White estimated he had sex with 3,000 men, recalling, “When I wrote that I’d had sex over the years with 3,000 men, one of my contemporaries asked pityingly: ‘Why so few?’”
He received numerous awards, including the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement (1989) and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction (2018). France made him Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
Edmund White passed away in June 2025, at the age of 85.
