Dominique Nabokov
Edmund White (1940–2025) contributed thirty articles and reviews to The New York Review between 1984 and 2018, on subjects ranging from Vladmir Nabokov to Palermo to gay marriage. He was the author of sixteen works of fiction, many of which drew on his own life, such as Forgetting Elena (1973), A Boy’s Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1997). His nonfiction works included The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) and States of Desire (1980), the memoirs My Lives (2005), City Boy (2009), and The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir (2025), and biographies of Marcel Proust, Jean Genet, and Arthur Rimbaud.
White was born in Cincinnati. After graduating from the University of Michigan he moved to New York, where in 1969 he witnessed the Stonewall Riot that launched the modern gay rights movement. Known for his frank and unapologetic explorations of gay life, he was one of the seven members of the Violet Quill, a group of gay writers founded in 1979 that included Felice Picano and Andrew Holleran. He lived in Rome, San Francisco, and Paris as well as New York, taught at Brown and Princeton, and was the recipient of numerous literary awards.
Featured
All Articles
Subscribe and save 50%!
Read the latest issue as soon as it’s available, and browse our rich archives. You'll have immediate subscriber-only access to over 1,200 issues and 25,000 articles published since 1963.
Subscribe now
Subscribe and save 50%!
Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App.
Already a subscriber? Sign in
