During the 1980sUnited States AIDS epidemic, he co-founded theGay Men's Health Crisis and wovethemes of illness and resilience into his writing. He spent many of these years in France, forming intellectual and social ties with figures likeMichel Foucault. Among the first public figures to speak openly about hisHIV-positive status when diagnosed, White remained healthy as along-term nonprogressor to AIDS. He began a lastingopen relationship with his husband, writerMichael Carroll, whom hemarried in 2013. White became a professor in the 1990s, teaching writing at universities likeBrown andPrinceton.
Edmund White was born inCincinnati on January 13, 1940.[5] He was the son of Delilah "Lila Mae" and Edmund White, II, a civil engineer and entrepreneur.[6]
He was raised in Cincinnati[6] andEvanston, Illinois, and spent most of his childhood in the Chicago area.[7] Beginning in the middle of his second year of high school, he attendedCranbrook School inMichigan.[7]
At Cranbrook, he was an honors student and penned two novels, one his first gay novel, and the other a story about a divorced woman that began as a writing assignment for a creative writing class.[7] He graduated from Cranbrook in 1958.[7]
White declined admission to Harvard University's Chinesedoctoral program in favor of following a lover to New York City. There, he freelanced forNewsweek, and spent seven years working as a staffer atTime-Life Books.[9] After briefly relocating toRome, San Francisco, and then returning to New York, he was briefly employed as an editor for theSaturday Review when the magazine was based in San Francisco in the early 1970s; after the magazine folded in 1973, White returned to New York to editHorizon (a quarterly cultural journal) and freelance as a writer and editor for entities such as Time-Life andThe New Republic.[9]
White wrote books and plays while a youth, including one unpublished novel titledMrs Morrigan.[10]
White's debut novel,Forgetting Elena (1973), set on an island, can be read as commenting on gay culture in a coded manner.[11][12] TheRussian-American novelistVladimir Nabokov called it "a marvelous book".[13]
Written with his psychotherapist[14]Charles Silverstein,The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) made him known to a wider readership.[15] It is celebrated for its sex-positive tone.[16]
From 1980 to 1981, White was a member of a gay writers' group,The Violet Quill, which met briefly during that period, and includedAndrew Holleran andFelice Picano.[18] White's autobiographic works are frank and unapologetic about his promiscuity and his HIV-positive status.[19]
In 1980, White brought outStates of Desire, a survey of some aspects of gay life in America. In 1982, he helped found the groupGay Men's Health Crisis in New York City.[20][21] In the same year appeared White's best-known work,A Boy's Own Story, the first volume of an autobiographic-fiction series, continuing withThe Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) andThe Farewell Symphony (1997), which describes stages in the life of a gay man from boyhood to middle age. Several characters in the latter novel are recognizably based on well-known people from White's New York-centered literary and artistic milieu.[22]
From 1983 to 1990, White lived in France. He moved there initially for one year in 1983 via theGuggenheim Fellowship for writing he had received, but took such a liking to Paris ("with its drizzle, as cool, grey and luxurious aschinchilla" as described in his autobiographical novelThe Farewell Symphony) that he stayed there for longer.[20] French philosopherMichel Foucault invited him for dinner several times,[20] dismissing White's concerns aboutHIV/AIDS aspuritanical.[23] They attended theParis Opera together, including aRegietheater production of an opera byJean-Philippe Rameau,[23] before Foucault died of the illness in 1984.[20]
After discovering he was HIV-positive around the same time, White joined the French HIV/AIDS organization,AIDES.[20] During this period, he brought out his novel,Caracole (1985), which centers on heterosexual relationships.[24] He maintained a lifelong interest in France and French literature, writing biographies ofJean Genet,Marcel Proust, andArthur Rimbaud.[25] He publishedGenet: a biography (1993),Our Paris: sketches from memory (1995),Marcel Proust (1998),The Flaneur: a stroll through the paradoxes of Paris (2000), andRimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (2008). He spent seven years writing the biography of Genet.[20]
White returned to the United States in 1997.[10]The Married Man, a novel published in 2000, is gay-themed and draws on White's life.[26]Fanny: A Fiction (2003) is a historical novel about novelistFrances Trollope and social reformerFrances Wright in early 19th-century America.[10] White's 2006 playTerre Haute (produced in New York City in 2009) portrays discussions that take place when a prisoner, based on terrorist bomberTimothy McVeigh, is visited by a writer based onGore Vidal. (In real life McVeigh and Vidal corresponded but did not meet.)[27]
In 2005 White published his autobiography,My Lives—organized by theme rather than chronology—and in 2009 his memoir of New York life in the 1960s and 1970s,City Boy.[28][25]
In 2025, at the age 85, White published a sex memoir,The Loves of My Life, which received a positive review inPublishers Weekly.[30] White died few months later after publication.
White, a gay man, was at theStonewall Inn in 1969 when the riots began as events solidifying a sense of community, makingLGBTQ movements in the United States more cohesive and publicly visible in the wake of thecivil rights movement.[31] He later wrote, "Ours may have been the firstfunny revolution."[32] "When someone shouted 'Gay is good' in imitation of 'Black is beautiful', we all laughed ... Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis".[33] "Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term," he explained. "Suddenly we saw that we could be aminority group—with rights, a culture, an agenda."[34]
In June 2012, Carroll reported that White was making a "remarkable" recovery after suffering two strokes in previous months.[36] He also had a heart attack.[37]
On June 3, 2025, White died at his home inChelsea, Manhattan, while suffering from an apparentgastroenteritis infection. He was 85.[39][40] He is survived by his husband, Michael, and his sister, Margaret.[6]
White is frequently noted as a major influence on gay American writers and literature. ThePublishing Triangle named their award for DébutLGBT Fiction theEdmund White Award.
French writerÉdouard Louis has said, "In France, White's books are not just considered important on a literary level—they're also a fundamental step in the construction of the gay self."[2] Other writers of note who have cited his influence includeGarth Greenwell,Garrard Conley, andAlexander Chee.[2]
In his 2005 memoirMy Lives, White citedJean Genet,Marcel Proust, andAndré Gide as influences, writing: "they convinced me that homosexuality was crucial to the development of the modern novel because it led to a resurrection of love, a profound skepticism about the naturalness of gender roles and a revival of the classical tradition of same-sex love that dominated Western poetry and prose until the birth of Christ".[28]
White received numerous awards and distinctions. He was the recipient of the inaugural Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 1989.[41] He was also the namesake of the aforementioned organization'sEdmund White Award for Debut Fiction.[42]
In 2014, Edmund White was presented with the Bonham Centre Award from the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies of theUniversity of Toronto, for his contributions to the advancement and education of issues around sexual identification.[43]
^abWhite, Edmund (2009)."How did one edit Nabokov?".City Boy. Archived fromthe original on September 26, 2015.Gerald Clarke...had gone to Montreux to do an interview with Nabokov forEsquire, and followed the usual drill...On his last evening in Switzerland he confronted Nabokov over drinks: 'So whom do you like?' he asked—since the great man had so far only listed his dislikes and aversions. 'Edmund White' Nabokov responded. 'He wroteForgetting Elena. It's a marvelous book." He'd then gone on to list titles byJohn Updike andDelmore Schwartz (particularly the short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"), as well as Robbe-Grillet'sJealousy among a few others.
^Altmann, Jennifer (July–August 2021)."Trailblazer in Gay Lit"(PDF).Princeton Alumni Weekly. RetrievedSeptember 18, 2021.
^Yohalem, John (December 10, 1978)."Apostrophes to a Dead Lover".The New York Times.Archived from the original on March 11, 2016. RetrievedSeptember 25, 2015.
^abParini, Jay (January 16, 2010)."City Boy by Edmund White, and Chaos by Edmund White".The Guardian. RetrievedSeptember 28, 2022.In My Lives: An Autobiography (2005), White dug into his primary material with clinical savagery, examining his life not in chronological terms but by subjects, such as 'My Shrinks', 'My Hustlers' and so on.
^Aletti, Vince (May 23, 2000)."Amour No More".The Village Voice. New York. Archived fromthe original on September 16, 2018. RetrievedSeptember 28, 2022.
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