Arts and Letters

In these 39 lively essays and profiles, best-selling novelist and biographer Edmund White draws on his wide reading and his sly good humor to illuminate some of the most influential writers, artists, and cultural icons of the past century, among them Marcel Proust, Catherine Deneuve, George Eliot, Andy Warhol, André Gide, David Geffen, and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Whether he’s praising Nabokov's sensuality, critiquing Elton John’s walk ("as though he’s a wind-up doll that's been overwound and sent heading for the top of the stairs"), or describing serendipitous moments in his seven-year-long research into the life of Genet, White is unfailingly observant, erudite, and entertaining.

Best-selling novelist, memoirist, and biographer Edmund White displays his sharp wit and boundless erudition in 37 portraits of the writers, artists, and cultural icons who have captured his curiosity and imagination for the last 20 years. White is as compelling as he is unpretentious in these stories of his encounters with some of the most provocative writers, artists, and personalities of our time. Marcel Proust, Catherine Deneuve, David Geffen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andre Gide, Michel Foucault, Andy Warhol, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Genet, Jasper Johns, Allen Ginsberg, Yves Saint Laurent, and Elton John are among the cast.

Newsweek

As a writer, White possesses the rare combination of a poetic sense of language and an ironic sense of humor.

Edmund White is the author of 17 books, including a trilogy of autobiographical novels: A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. His most recent novel is Fanny: A Fiction. Other books include the novels Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, Caracole, and The Married Man, as well as a collection of short stories titled Skinned Alive. White lived in Paris for many years and wrote The Flâneur and Our Paris about his time there. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Genet: A Biography and has also written a short biography of Proust and a collection of essays, The Burning Library. A regular contributor to The TLS, The New York Times Book Review, and Vanity Fair, Edmund White is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is the director of the creative writing program at Princeton University. He lives in New York City.