Edmund White books

Adam Mars-Jones Collections Reading Order

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Non-Fiction

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Edmund White was born in Cincinnati in 1940 and grew up in the Midwest before moving to New York City, where he became part of the downtown literary scene in the 1960s and 70s. His debut novel Forgetting Elena (1973) caught the attention of Vladimir Nabokov, and White went on to write prolifically across fiction, memoir, biography, and criticism. He lived in Paris for sixteen years and has drawn on both American and French settings throughout his career. His biography of Jean Genet, published in 1993, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

White’s fiction is deeply autobiographical, and his Edmund Trilogy traces a gay man’s life from boyhood in the 1950s through the AIDS crisis. Beyond his own novels, he has edited anthologies, contributed to the Penguin Lives biography series with a volume on Marcel Proust, and co-authored The Darker Proof with Adam Mars-Jones. His non-fiction ranges from travel writing about Paris and New York to literary criticism and cultural history.