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An irresistible literary treat: a memoir of the social and sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual in-crowd in the tumultuous 1970s, from acclaimed author Edmund White. In the New Y ork of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy’s Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White’s years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. I t’s a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons. An esteemed novelist and cultural critic, Edmund White is the author of many books, including the autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story; a previous memoir, My Lives; and most recently a biography of poet Arthur Rimbaud. White lives in New York City and teaches writing at Princeton University. An irresistible literary treat: a memoir of the social and sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual in-crowd in the tumultuous 1970s, from acclaimed author Edmund White. In the New Y ork of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy’s Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White’s years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. I t’s a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons. “[A] moving chronicle . . . that peacock’s tail, those stag’s antlers—they’re here, to be sure, but so are vulnerability, doubt, failure and long years toiling at the sort of cruddy day jobs that most literary writers know all too well . . . In City Boy, White is amusing and raucous as ever but he also lets the mask slip…his losses and struggles, as consequence, seems less sculpted, but more real . . . Some stories don’t need to be embellished to glow.”—The New York Times Book Review "An open-throttled tour of New York City during the bad old days of the 1960s and early '70s . . . it's all here in exacting and eye-popping detail . . . There is a great deal of sex and gossip in City Boy, but it is also a minor-key account of Mr. White's coming of age as a writer . . . City Boy is Mr. White's second memoir in three years, and a great deal of his fiction has been autobiographical. You get the sense of a writer slowly peeling his life like an artichoke, letting only a few stray leaves go at a time . . . This one is salty and buttery, for sure. Mr. White's 'Oh, come on, guys' meekness has vanished into thin air."—The New York Times "Chronicl[es]Gotham’s cultural highs and lows during those two heady and iconic decades . . . fleshing out our notion of how vital a period the ’60s and ’70s were . . . Since White is a born raconteur, his gimlet-eyed anecdotes about celebrities of the era are as tangy as blood orange sorbet served after lobster Thermidor . . . [he] matches his talent for journalism with brilliant imagistic prose."—Gay City News " City Boy is an amazing memoir of White’s hunger for literary fame—for publication even—and intellectual esteem in the superheated creative world of ’60s and ’70s New York. His sketches of writers and artists, including everyone from poets James Merrill and John Ashbery to artist Robert Wilson and editor Robert Gottlieb, are full of bon mots, sharply observed details, and great honesty about his own desires for love and esteem. City Boy vividly brings to life the sheer squalor of life in 1970s New York . . . A wonderful raconteur with a well-stocked fund of anecdotes and observations, White’s writings reveal much about alliances, alignments, and personalities from a vanished world that still echo strongly in our own."— This Week in New York
"[An] exuberant, thoughtful memoir. Arriving in 1962 and determined to be famous, [Edmund White] found a job in publishing and got to work on his dream. Away from the office, he dedicated his energy to meeting people (some famous, some not) and, of course, having sex with lots and lots of men. Ambition, amphetamines, neurosis and an era when New York vibrated with desire combined for heady times in his young life . . . White wrestled with self-acceptance as he pursued therapy to reorient himself for a (never-to-be) heterosexual marriage; he admits he was so consumed with internalized self-loathing that he didn't have a clear idea of how he looked. Others, however, did not miss the handsome, eager man in all his '60s and '70s glory, and he made friends easily. White's affectionate yet candid portraits of literary celebrities Richard Howard, Harold Brodkey and Susan Sontag celebrate those friendships, with the eminences coming across as quite distinct from their forbidding pubic personas, even lovable. White got around in less elevated circles too. He saw a lifetime of scandalous acting out that bubbles up in passing remarks like, 'When gay men say in their personals, 'No drama queens, please,' they are trying to avoid someone like Coleman.' Sparkling cameo appearances by the likes of Truman Capote, Robert Mapplethorpe and Fran Lebowitz expand the feeling that artistic Manhattan then was a very different place than it is today. All fun aside, the gadabout boulevardier at some point had to take a back seat to the fiercely ambitious emerging writer. White's vivid analysis of his artistic struggles and literary progress during these years is like a master class for other writers. As he notes, the years of uncertainty helped him develop and refine his themes, otherwise he 'would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others.' Many readers of his landmark novel, A Boy's Own Story, will sit up at attention when he links his goal of writing 'a modern tragedy in which there were two choices and both were bad' to Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. That like-minded connection to Bowen also serves to explain his insistence that any truly satisfying work of literature must embrace a mysterious element of charm. Let it be known that White's memoir takes that lesson to heart and has charm to burn."—John McFarland, Shelf Awareness "A graceful memoir of a decidedly ungraceful time in the life of New York City . . . A welcome port ...
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If there is anyone worthy of producing an intimate biography of the enigmatic genius behind Remembrance of Things Past, it is Edmund White, himself an award- winning writer for whom Marcel Proust has long been an obsession. White introduces us not only to the recluse endlessly rewriting his one massive work through the night, but also the darling of Parisian salons, the grasper after honors, and the closeted homosexual—a subject this book is the first to explore openly. From the frothiest gossip to the deepest angst, here is a moving portrait to be treasured by anyone looking for an introduction to this literary icon....
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“One has the impression, reading The Flâneur, of having fallen into the hands of a highly distractible, somewhat eccentric poet and professor who is determined to show you a Paris you wouldn’t otherwise see…Edmund White tells such a good story that I’m ready to listen to anything he wants to talk about.”—New York Times Book Review
A flâneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through city streets in search of adventure and fulfillment. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians. In the hands of the learned White, a walk through Paris is both a tour of its lush, sometimes prurient history and an evocation of the city’s spirit. The Flâneur leads us to bookshops and boutiques, monuments and palaces, giving us a glimpse into the inner human drama. Along the way we learn everything from the latest debates among French lawmakers to the juicy details of Colette’s life. ...
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White has created a richly diverse anthology that explores the literary expression of male homosexuality in the American and English tradition. Contributors include Henry James, Alfred Chester, Armistead Maupin, Neil Bartlett, Allan Gurganus, and others. A Lambda Literary Award finalist....
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Moving with sinuous ease from a claustrophobic Midwestern college town in the 1950s to Greenwich Village on the night of the Stonewall rebellion, Edmund White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel is a portrait of the artist as a young gay man finding his way within a country that has no room for sexual dissidents....
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Originally published in 1982 as the first of Edmund White’s trilogy of autobiographical novels, A Boy’s Own Story became an instant classic for its pioneering portrayal of homosexuality. The book’s unnamed narrator, growing up during the 1950s, is beset by aloof parents, a cruel sister, and relentless mocking from his peers, compelling him to seek out works of art and literature as solace—and to uncover new relationships in the struggle to embrace his own sexuality. Lyrical and poignant, with powerful evocations of shame and yearning, this is an American literary treasure....
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The distinguished biographer, novelist, and memoirist Edmund White brings his literary mastery to a new biography of Arthur Rimbaud.
Poet and prodigy Arthur Rimbaud led a life that was startlingly short, but just as dramatically eventful and accomplished. Even today, over a century after his death in 1891, his visionary poetry has continued to influence everyone from Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan to Patti Smith. His long poem A Season in Hell (1873) and his collection Illuminations (1886) are essential to the modern canon, marked by a hallucinatory and hypnotic style that defined the Symbolist movement in poetry. Having sworn off writing at the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud drifted around the world from scheme to scheme, ultimately dying from an infection contracted while running guns in Africa. He was thirty-seven.
Edmund White writes with a historian's eye for detail, driven by a genuine personal investment in his subject. White delves deep into the young poet's relationships with his family, his teachers, and his notorious affair with the more established poet Paul Verlaine. He follows the often elusive (sometimes blatant) threads of sexual taboo that haunt Rimbaud's poems (in those days, sodomy was a crime) and offers incisive interpretations of the poems, using his own artful translations to bring us closer to the mercurial poet.
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In a damp, old Sussex castle, American literary phenomenon Stephen Crane lies on his deathbed, wasting away from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. The world-famous author has retreated to England with his wife, Cora, in part to avoid gossip about her ignominious past as the proprietress of an infamous Florida bordello, the Hotel de Dream. In the midst of gathering tragedy, Crane begins dictating what will surely be his final work: a strange and poignant novel of a boy prostitute in 1890s New York and the married man who ruins his own life to win his love. ...
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No one has been more frank, lucid, and entertaining about growing up gay in Middle America than Edmund White. Best known for his autobiographical novels, starting with A Boy's Own Story, White here takes fiction out of his story and delivers the facts of his life in all their shocking and absorbing verity. In My Lives, White shares his enthusiasms and his passions, and he introduces us to his lovers and predilections. ...
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“White’s abiding kinship with Rimbaud gives this restless soul’s well-traveled tale new fire.”—Vanity Fair Poet and prodigy Arthur Rimbaud’s brief life was eventful and accomplished, and his daring and visionary poetry continues to shock and captivate modern readers. Edmund White writes with a historian’s eye for detail but also with a genuine personal investment, bringing us closer to the mercurial poet. ....
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