Edmund White, Lewis Center for the Arts

Professor of Creative Writing, Emeritus

Photo by Nick Barberio

About

Edmund White was born on January 13, 1940, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended Cranbrook Academy, majored in Chinese at the University of Michigan, and then moved to New York City. White began his career as an editor and writer, working at Time-Life Books, Newsweek, The Saturday Review and Horizon. He also served as director of New York University’s New York Institute for the Humanities.

After working at Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Brown universities, White joined Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing in 1998. He served as the program’s director from 2002 to 2006.

White is the author of more than 20 books. He has written more than a dozen works of fiction, including his amalgamation of Heian Japan in The Tale of Genji and contemporary life on Fire Island, Forgetting Elena (1973), Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978), and an autobiographical trilogy, A Boy’s Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1997). His most recent novel, A Saint from Texas, was published in 2020.

As a biographer, White has written a monumental biography of the French novelist and playwright Jean Genet (Genet, 1993), for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also penned short biographies of Marcel Proust (Marcel Proust: A Life, 1998) and the poet Arthur Rimbaud (Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, 2008). White’s other nonfiction includes City Boy (2009); The Flâneur (2000); Inside a Pearl (2014), about his years in Paris; and The Unpunished Vice (2018), about his life as a reader; among other memoirs. He is also a playwright; his works for the stage include The Blue Boy in Black (1963) and Terre Haute (2006), among others.

White was appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016 he was named state author of New York and in 2018 was named winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. In addition, White received the 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

White lives in New York with his husband, the writer Michael Carroll.