Overview
A biography of the most acclaimed gay novelist of his generation--fully authorized by Edmund White himself.Edmund White: The Burning World is the first biography of the novelist whose personal life reflects the course of gay history in America in the last half of the twentieth century.
Born in Cincinnati in 1940 and raised in Evanston, White arrived in New York City in 1962, tortured by the knowledge of his homosexuality. Working by day as a staff writer for Time-Life, he secretly cruised the West Village past nightfall. To appreciate White's life is to understand the formative years of gay liberation, for White--who was a participant at the original Stonewall event--experienced all of the ecstasy and abandonment that came to characterize this first generation of post-Stonewall gay men.
Yet while many gay men of his era took to politics, White himself chose to record the extraordinary social and sexual revolution of which he was a prime participant through literature and novels. Whether writing about Fire Island in Forgetting Elena or about gay social revolution in America in States of Desire, White capture the energy and the emotions of an underground culture which had finally thrown off the shackles of its repression. And in A Boy's Own Summer, White helped to define the coming-out novel as a new gay genre.
With complete access to all of White's files and materials, Stephen Barber has created an extraordinary testament to the life of one of America's most respected literary artists.
Barber's fluid prose demonstrates intense research, accompanied by a tendency to stay close to his subject's point of view, with some passages appearing to be paraphrased from interviews with White...and Barber rises to painful eloquence in describing the last days of White's beloved partner, Hubert Sorin, who died of AIDS in Morocco in 1994." --Publishers Weekly"Edmund White is the wizard of American fiction. By turns and at once, his work is ecstatic and elegant, saucy and transcendent. This first look behind the curtain catches him at the controls--a writer whose human complexities intrigue, and whose artistry remains elusive, enthralling, essential. The Burning World crackles and gleams--a fascinating biography!" -J. D. McClatchy, Poet and Critic
"One of the best lives I have read in years. Time and again I found myself provoked not just to a new understanding of White's life and work, but to a fresh consideration of how for a gay person to fully identify as gay today sparks creativity. But only if that identity is seen not as limiting, but as contributing to the larger culture. One must see oneself as White clearly does: just as he is always but never American, so also his self-understanding, entirely gay is always more than gay." --Douglas Shand Tucci, author of The Art of Scandal : The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner
"It is, in truth, the writer and not the writing that is extraordinary--in the purity with which he has maintained a life in desire. ...Barber has written a brilliant book in celebration of this rare quality, and in places--I think particularly of his harrowing account of Hubert Sorin's death from Aids in Morocco--he rises to heights of which his subject (and friend) must surely be proud." --Independent on Sunday
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
A vivid prose stylist and a premier chronicler of gay life, gay desire and gay liberation, Edmund White has achieved renown as a novelist and as a nonfiction writer. A Boy's Own Story helped define the coming-out novel; the decades of journalism collected in The Burning Library gave gay male America a detailed picture of itself, sometimes angry, often celebratory. And his colossal biography of Jean Genet gave Anglophone readers new access to the rule-smashing French author. This authorized biography follows White's life from his birth in 1940, in Cincinnati, to his current residence in Paris. Barber's (Fragments of the European City) fluid prose demonstrates intense research, accompanied by a tendency to stay close to his subject's point of view, with some passages appearing to be paraphrased from interviews with White. The biography touches on White's array of friends and famous allies, among them Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan Sontag, James Merrill and Adam Mars-Jones. White immersed himself in the gay New York of the 1970s; his move to Paris in 1983 divides his adult life neatly in half. Barber's account of the Paris years is slower paced--and more revealing--but sexual encounters, social misadventures and literary accomplishments in both cities get adequate coverage, as do White's months on an idyllic Turkish island and his entanglements in Brown University's campus politics. White's later fiction records the awful impact of HIV, and Barber rises to painful eloquence in describing the last days of White's beloved partner, Hubert Sorin, who died of AIDS in Morocco in 1994. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.the James White Review
There are two strains to Barber's highly romantic story. The first, the fable of the middle-aged American who, after much travel, finds a spiritual home in Europe, is straight out of Henry James. The second strain, the tale of a man who after many meaningless affairs finally finds true love with a handsome soul mate doomed to die young, is more Bette Davis. Barber is himself an expatriate American, and his anti-American and Eurocentric prejudices are manifest not merely in these two narrative lines, but in more subtle ways as well.The first strain of Barber's story is particularly problematic, the second just slightly less so...