Edmund Valentine White III (January 13, 1940 – June 3, 2025) was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and essayist. A pioneering figure in LGBTQ and especially gay literature after the Stonewall riots, he wrote with rare candor about gay identity, relationships, and sex. and the "patron saint of queer literature", White received numerous honors, including the Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. He also wrote biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud, plus memoirs My Lives (2005) and City Boy (2009). France made him (1993) and later de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Early life and education

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati on January 13, 1940. He was the son of Delilah "Lila Mae" and Edmund White, II, a civil engineer and entrepreneur.

He was raised in Cincinnati

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.

White declined admission to Harvard University's Chinese doctoral program in favor of following a lover to New York City. There, he freelanced for Newsweek, and spent seven years working as a staffer at Time-Life Books. After briefly relocating to Rome, San Francisco, and then returning to New York, he was briefly employed as an editor for the Saturday 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 edit Horizon (a quarterly cultural journal) and freelance as a writer and editor for entities such as Time-Life and The New Republic. The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov called it "a marvelous book".

Written with his psychotherapist Charles Silverstein, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) made him known to a wider readership. It is celebrated for its sex-positive tone.

His next novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) was explicitly gay-themed and drew on his own life.

From 1980 to 1981, White was a member of a gay writers' group, The Violet Quill, which met briefly during that period, and included Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano. White's autobiographic works are frank and unapologetic about his promiscuity and his HIV-positive status.

In 1980, White brought out States of Desire, a survey of some aspects of gay life in America. In 1982, he helped found the group Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City. In the same year appeared White's best-known work, A Boy's Own Story, the first volume of an autobiographic-fiction series, continuing with The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The 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.

Life in France

From 1983 to 1990, White lived in France. He moved there initially for one year in 1983 via the Guggenheim Fellowship for writing he had received, but took such a liking to Paris ("with its drizzle, as cool, grey and luxurious as chinchilla" as described in his autobiographical novel The Farewell Symphony) that he stayed there for longer. They attended the Paris Opera together, including a Regietheater production of an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau, He maintained a lifelong interest in France and French literature, writing biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. Fanny: A Fiction (2003) is a historical novel about novelist Frances Trollope and social reformer Frances Wright in early 19th-century America. White's 2006 play Terre Haute (produced in New York City in 2009) portrays discussions that take place when a prisoner, based on terrorist bomber Timothy McVeigh, is visited by a writer based on Gore Vidal. (In real life McVeigh and Vidal corresponded but did not meet.)

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.

White taught at Brown University in the early 1990s, and in 1999 became professor of creative writing in Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts.

In 2025, at the age 85, White published a sex memoir, The Loves of My Life, which received a positive review in Publishers Weekly. White died few months later after publication.

Personal life

White, a gay man, was at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 when the riots began as events solidifying a sense of community, making LGBTQ movements in the United States more cohesive and publicly visible in the wake of the civil rights movement. He later wrote, "Ours may have been the first funny revolution." "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". "Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term," he explained. "Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group—with rights, a culture, an agenda."

Though raised Christian Scientist, White was atheist. However, he was a non-progressor, one of the small percentage of cases that have not led to AIDS.

In June 2012, Carroll reported that White was making a "remarkable" recovery after suffering two strokes in previous months. He also had a heart attack.

In a 2023 interview with Colm Tóibín, White stated that he had previously dated writer Tony Heilbut.

On June 3, 2025, White died at his home in Chelsea, Manhattan, while suffering from an apparent gastroenteritis infection. He was 85. He is survived by his husband, Michael, and his sister, Margaret. The Publishing Triangle named their award for Début LGBT Fiction the Edmund White Award.

French writer Édouard 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."

In 2014, Edmund White was presented with the Bonham Centre Award from the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies of the University of Toronto, for his contributions to the advancement and education of issues around sexual identification.

  • 1983: Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts
  • 1992: Lambda Literary Award nomination, for Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction
  • 1993: David R. Kessler Award in LGBTQ Studies, CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies
  • 1993: National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, for Genet
  • 1994: Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography nomination, for Genet: A Biography
  • 1994: Lambda Literary Award, for Genet: A Biography
  • 1996: Member, American Academy of Arts and Letters
  • 1996: Lambda Literary Award nomination, for Our Paris
  • 1998: Lambda Literary Award nomination, for The Farewell Symphony
  • 2001: Lambda Literary Award nomination, for The Married Man
  • 2002: Stonewall Book Award for Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS

<!-- *2010: Mondello Prize -->

  • 2016–2018: New York State Edith Wharton Citation of Merit
  • 2018: PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction
  • 2019: National Book Foundation, Lifetime Achievement Award

Works

Fiction

  • Forgetting Elena (1973),
  • Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978), ,
  • A Boy's Own Story (1982), ,
  • Caracole (1985), ,
  • The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988),
  • Skinned Alive: Stories (1995),
  • The Farewell Symphony (1997),
  • The Married Man (2000),
  • Fanny: A Fiction (2003),
  • Chaos: A Novella and Stories (2007),
  • Hotel de Dream (2007),
  • Jack Holmes and His Friend (2012), ,
  • Our Young Man (2016), ,
  • A Saint from Texas (2020),
  • A Previous Life (2022),
  • The Humble Lover (2023),

Plays

  • Terre Haute (2006),

Nonfiction

  • The Joy of Gay Sex, with Charles Silverstein (1977),
  • States of Desire (1980),
  • The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Politics and Sexuality 1969–1993 (1994), ,
  • The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (2000),
  • Arts and Letters (2004), ,
  • Sacred Monsters (2011),

Biography

  • Genet: A Biography (1993), ,
  • Marcel Proust (1998), ,
  • Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (2008), ,

Memoirs

  • Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (1995),
  • My Lives (2005),
  • City Boy (2009), ,
  • Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris (2014), ,
  • The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading (2018),
  • The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir (2025),

Anthologies

  • The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis, with Adam Mars-Jones (1988)