Edmund White

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Edmund White (2007)

Edmund Valentine White III (born January 13, 1940 in Cincinnati , Ohio ) is an American writer and essayist . He has been Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University since 1998 and is considered one of the most important contemporary homosexual writers.

Life

Edmund White was born in 1940 in Cincinnati, the son of an industrial clerk and a child psychologist, and graduated from Cranbrook School (now: Cranbrook Kingswood School). His parents divorced when he was seven years old. The mother moved him and his sister to Evanston, Illinois . At fifteen, White began a psychoanalysis that he described in retrospect as "almost completely destructive". Later, a psychoanalyst friend of his, who was also an author, helped him a lot over a period of twenty years. In Michigan he attended a boarding school and then went to the University of Michigan to study Sinology . In 1962 he received his bachelor's degree in Chinese . His application for admission to Harvard University was accepted - he wanted to expand his sinology knowledge there - but followed his lover to New York City, where he plunged into the emerging gay subculture and, as evidenced by his memoirs ( City Boy ) , which appeared in 2009, had numerous erotic adventures . He was an eyewitness to the Stonewall riots in June 1969, which are considered the birth of the modern homosexual emancipation movement, but regarded the immediate event as a "stupid event", "more Dada than Bastille".

After long stays in New York and Rome , he worked from 1962 to 1970 as an editor for the Time Life publishing house, then as senior editor for The Saturday Review (1972–1973) and as editor of the magazine Horizon (1974–75). From 1977 to 1979 he was an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University , where, in his own words, he taught "mainly himself", especially since some students were "better educated" than he was: "In the beginning, my university activities served me to get clear about my own methods. Then I used the class to improve my work. For example, I was weak at creating storylines and so I talked a lot in front of the students about how to make a strong plot and how to do it Can analyze novels and short stories by other authors under this aspect. " He then taught literature at Columbia University School of Arts (1980/82). Together with six other gay authors, he founded the literary group Violet Quill . Members of this group were: Christopher Cox , Robert Ferro , Michael Grumley , Andrew Holleran , Felice Picano and George Whitmore . This group formed a core of the gay literature emerging in the USA in the 1970s. After the majority of the authors of the period (including four from the Violet Quill group) died of AIDS , White sees himself as a "survivor" who lost his contemporaries. He himself has publicly announced that he has known about being HIV- positive since 1985 .

In 1983, on the recommendation of his friend Susan Sontag , White received a Guggenheim grant and moved to Paris . He lived there until 1990 and then returned to the French capital again and again. In 1990/92 he was a professor at Brown University, and since 1998 he has taught at Princeton , where he headed the creative writing program from 2002 to 2006 . In 2016 he was named "State Clerk" for New York.

plant

After White's first stories Forgetting Elena (1973), a biting satire about gay life on Fire Island , and Notturno for the King of Naples (1978) appeared in 1982 as the first title in a series of autobiographical novels Self-Portrait of a Young Man . It depicts the end of childhood of a boy who discovers his homosexuality and tries to find out how to deal with this discovery. After being diagnosed with HIV, he published the sarcastic comic Caracole , a satire about the debauchery of residents in an imaginary city. This book was followed by And the Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), Farewell Symphony (1997) and The Married Man (2000). This concludes the tetralogy of his autobiographical novels. In his memoirs City Boy (2009, German 2015), White mainly dealt with New York in the sixties and seventies of the 20th century, his life in the local subculture, the emergence of the gay emancipation movement and his various stays abroad. He also looked back on his professional career in journalism and as a freelance writer. Short stories were published in 1995 under the title Skinned Alive (Eng. When alive , 1998). White wrote two biographies - about Jean Genet in 1993 and about Marcel Proust in 1999. Together with Dr. Charles Silverstein wrote the sex guide Die Freuden der Schwulen (1977), a work that he classified as a "very big coming out" and a "political act" because it made himself the "spokesman" for the gay movement. In 1994 the anthology The Burning Library was published with essays written from 1970.

In his 1991 essay Out of the closet onto the bookshelf , White wrote that as a teenager he could only find two books with homosexual references in the public library: The Death in Venice by Thomas Mann and the Nijinsky biography, his wife's had written. In both books he found the view of homosexuality extremely negative. Having changed this, White regards as a great contribution to the generation of writers of which he himself belongs.

The Washington Post wrote of White's work: "Whatever his sources, everything White publishes is engaging and intelligent, rests upon diverse, even unexpected, education, instinctively turns to the autobiographical and anecdotal, and arises from a strong desire to to remind us that authors, artists and performers must be evaluated in the light of the respective historical moment. " The author's "greatest achievement" is to give his readers an insight into "the gift and the burden" of a gay life. He had always called for "never to spurn lust" and regretted that sex is not valued by Americans, especially puritans, as an art of living and affection, but rather as a revelation, "transcendent" search for meaning and perfection.

Awards

White is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999).

Works (selection)

  • Forgetting Elena. 1973 (story)
  • with Charles Silverstein : The joy of gay sex. 1977 (guide)
    • German edition: The joys of gays. A guide to living and loving. Gmünder, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-924163-02-2
  • Nocturnes for the king of Naples. 1978
    • German edition: Notturno for the King of Naples. Novel. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1981, ISBN 3-498-07291-9
  • States of desire. 1980
    • German edition: States of Longing. Travel through Gay America. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 1982, ISBN 3-10-091201-2
  • A boy's own story. 1982 (autobiographical novel)
  • Caracole. 1985 (novel)
  • The beautiful room is empty. 1988
    • German edition: And the beautiful room is empty. Novel. Kindler, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-463-40109-6
  • with Adam Mars-Jones : The darker proof. 1987
    • German edition: Not different from fire. Definitely positive ...; Stories. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1988, ISBN 3-499-12422-X
  • Jean Genet. 1993
  • The burning library. 1994
  • Skinned alive. 1995
  • The Flâneur. 1995
    • German edition: Instructions for use for Paris. Piper, Munich / Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-492-27521-4
  • The farewell symphony. 1997
  • Marcel Proust. 1999 (biography)
  • The Married Man. 2000 (autobiographical novel)
  • City boy. My Life in New York during the 1960s and '70s. Bloomsbury, New York City 2009, ISBN 978-1-596914025 . (autobiographical novel)
  • Jack Holmes and his friend. 2012 (novel)
  • Our Young Man. 2016 (novel)
    • German edition: Der Flaneur. Forays through the other Paris. Translated by Heinz Vrchota. Albino Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-95985-079-7

Play:

literature

  • Will Brantley and Nancy McGuire Roche (Eds.): Conversations with Edmund White , Jackson 2017 ISBN 9781496813565

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www. britica.com/biography/Edmund-White
  2. ↑ Will Brantley and Nancy McGuire Roche (Eds.): Conversations with Edmund White , Jackson 2017, unpag.E-Book
  3. ↑ Will Brantley and Nancy McGuire Roche (Eds.): Conversations with Edmund White , Jackson 2017, unpag.E-Book
  4. ↑ https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2488/edmund-white-the-art-of-fiction-no-105-edmund-white
  5. ↑ Will Brantley and Nancy McGuire Roche (Eds.): Conversations with Edmund White , Jackson 2017, unpag.E-Book
  6. ↑ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44007-2004Nov11.html?nav=rss_style/columns/dirdamichael
personal data
SURNAME White, Edmund
ALTERNATIVE NAMES White, Edmund Valentine III
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and essayist
DATE OF BIRTH January 13, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Cincinnati , Ohio