City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s [Paperback]

Edmund White (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 28, 2010

Groundbreaking literary icon Edmund White reflects on his remarkable life in New York in an era when the city was economically devastated but incandescent with art and ideas. White struggles to gain literary recognition, witnesses the rise of the gay rights movement, and has memorable encounters with luminaries from Elizabeth Bishop to William Burroughs, Susan Sontag to Jasper Johns. Recording his ambitions and desires, recalling lovers and literary heroes, White displays the wit, candor, and generosity that have defined his unique voice over the decades.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Novelist and critic White (A Boy's Own Story; The Joy of Gay Sex) weaves erotic encounters and long-ago literati into a vast tapestry of Manhattan memories. He arrived from the Midwest in 1962, worked at Time-Life Books, haunted the Gotham Book Mart and went street cruising: We had to seek out most of our men on the hoof. In 1970, he quit his job to live in Rome, returning to find sexual abundance in New York. An editor with Saturday Review and Horizon, White knew artists, writers and poets, yet his own writing remained at the starting gate. He fictionalized Fire Island rituals for his first novel, Forgetting Elena (1971), which took years to find a publisher and then sold only 600 copies. Nabokov later labeled it a marvelous book, ranking White along with Updike and Robbe-Grillet. His second novel, about hetero/homosexual friendships, was never published, yet he longed for literary celebrity. How he overcame setbacks and confronted his insecurities to eventually write 23 books makes for fascinating reading. Along the way, he notes how Fun City became Fear City with the AIDS crisis, and he recalls meeting everyone from Borges, Burroughs and Capote to Peggy Guggenheim, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jasper Johns. White writes with a simple, fluid style, and beneath his patina of pain, a refreshing honesty emerges. This is a brilliant recreation of an era, rich in revels, revolutions and leather boys leading the human tidal wave. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“[A] moving chronicle…that peacock’s tail, those stag’s antlers—they’re here, to be sure, but so are vulnerability, doubt, failure and long years toiling at the sort of cruddy day jobs that most literary writers know all too well…In City Boy, White is amusing and raucous as ever but he also lets the mask slip…his losses and struggles, as consequence, seems less sculpted, but more real….City Boy, plain-spoken and knowing, is a survivor’s tale, a missive from one of those antlered boys of that era to the others who are gone: this is who we were, this is how it was, this was our city. Some stories don’t need to be embellished to glow.”—New York Times Book Review

“City Boy is Mr. White's second memoir in three years, and a great deal of his fiction (notably the novel ''A Boy's Own Story'') has been autobiographical. You get the sense of a writer slowly peeling his life like an artichoke, letting only a few stray leaves go at a time…this one is salty and buttery, for sure. Mr. White's ''Oh, come on, guys'' meekness has vanished into thin air.”—New York Times

“Novelist and critic White weaves erotic encounters and long-ago literati into a vast tapestry of Manhattan memories… How he overcame setbacks and confronted his insecurities to eventually write 23 books makes for fascinating reading…White writes with a simple, fluid style, and beneath his patina of pain, a refreshing honesty emerges. This is a brilliant recreation of an era, rich in revels, revolutions and ‘leather boys leading the human tidal wave.’”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A colorfully detailed remembrance…with his novelist’s brilliance in turns of phrase in evoking these places, [White] also recalls the many celebrated writers he encountered over the years in his slow climb to writerly success. A special invitation to a world gone by.”—Booklist (starred review)

“A graceful memoir of a decidedly ungraceful time in the life of New York City…. A welcome portrait of a time and place long past, and much yearned for.”—Kirkus

“[White] retained a keen appreciation for the varieties of affection, which is gracefully displayed here. Lively sketches of James Merrill, Susan Sontag, Robert Mapplethorpe, and others are occasionally sharp as well as fond, but White’s candor extends equally to his own doubts and failures.”—New Yorker

“So witty, so insightful, so bristling with gossip, that one almost fails to notice that it is an essential chronicle of a revolution in many ways no less important than the fall of Communism: the gay liberation movement, in which White was both an actor and a privileged spectator…In one of his many discourses on friends famous -- Jasper Johns, Peggy Guggenheim, James Merrill -- and otherwise, White described a now-forgotten novelist's book as lacking "that key, embarrassing literary quality no one knows how to discuss: charm." City Boy is full of it, even when discussing weighty topics.”—Harpers

“The oral histories of Edmund White—who relives his decades-old glory days as a hobbing, nobbing City Boy.”—Vanity Fair

 

“As someone who lived through the period and knew most of the people Ed White writes about, I was delighted to read his new book, City Boy. The charm and candor of his work has never been more apparent. I finished City Boy wanting still more—which is a rare reading experience.”—Martin Duberman, author of Waiting to Land

“Since White is a born raconteur, his gimlet-eyed anecdotes about celebrities of the era are as tangy as blood orange sorbet served after lobster Thermidor… [he] matches his talent for journalism with brilliant imagistic prose.”—Gay City News

“In his 23 books, novelist and literary critic White has become one of the premier chroniclers of New York City intellectual life and the gay world…White unabashedly turns the pen on himself and the dozens of writers and artists he met in his years coming of age as a gay man in New York.”—NY Post

“Edmund White's writing of the past quarter-century adds up to a story of inner life repressed and then bursting forth into full expressive flower, as well as a neat encapsulation of the history of gay subculture…He's eloquent on the horrific psychic cost of closeted gay identity, pre-Stonewall.”—Washington Post

“[White] is a more highbrow Augusten Burroughs; a more sedate and scholarly David Sedaris…[City Boy] is an exquisitely written, devilishly detailed account of White's life in the City.”—Huffington Post

“[An] exuberant, thoughtful memoir… White's affectionate yet candid portraits of literary celebrities Richard Howard, Harold Brodkey and Susan Sontag celebrate those friendships, with the eminences coming across as quite distinct from their forbidding pubic personas, even lovable…Sparkling cameo appearances by the likes of Truman Capote, Robert Mapplethorpe and Fran Lebowitz expand the feeling that artistic Manhattan then was a very different place than it is today. All fun aside, the gadabout boulevardier at some point had to take a back seat to the fiercely ambitious emerging writer. White's vivid analysis of his artistic struggles and literary progress during these years is like a master class for other writers…. White's memoir…has charm to burn.”—Shelf Awareness

“Decades before Times Square looked like a trailer park filled with tourists in lawn chairs and real estate prices hit the stratosphere, New York was seedy and dangerous. But for a young gay man from the Midwest, it was also a refuge, full of possibility and excitement, where strangers became lovers with one furtive glance, as Edmund White evokes in his fascinating historical memoir City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s…like his novels, the portrait he paints is unflinching.”—Modern Tonic

“CITY BOY is an amazing memoir of White’s hunger for literary fame — for publication even — and intellectual esteem in the superheated creative world of ’60s and ’70s New York. His sketches of writers and artists, including everyone from poets James Merrill and John Ashbery to artist Robert Wilson and editor Robert Gottlieb, are full of bon mots, sharply observed details, and great honesty about his own desires for love and esteem. CITY BOY vividly brings to life the sheer squalor of life in 1970s New York …A wonderful raconteur with a well-stocked fund of anecdotes and observations, White’s writings reveal much about alliances, alignments, and personalities from a vanished world that still echo strongly in our own.”—This Week in New York

“Edmund White is no one-trick pony. The prolific novelist, critic, memoirist, gay activist, professor and social aspirant has waded into countless literary and intellectual pools and sent visible ripples through each. White's latest book, a ruminative and rambling memoir of his time in New York City in the 1970s, takes readers on a dime tour through the writer's initiation into circles that spun with such blinding talents as Susan Sontag, Richard Howard, John Ashbery, Michel Foucault, even Vladimir Nabokov and Anthony Burgess. ‘City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s’ dispenses with the jaw-dropping lyricism of the books that made him famous (his beloved memoir ‘A Boy's Own Story,’ especially) and replaces it with a didactic narrative flecked with powerful bits of insight, buried like chunks of brown sugar in a big pot of literary oatmeal…’City Boy’ presents an exhilarating sketch of the grizzled, untamed and dangerous way of life that was New York in the 1960s and '70s… Surely [White] deserves a notable place in the pantheon of the artists and writers who populate his book, which serves as a testament to his talent and to the credibility he has laboriously built up in his years as a working writer…We're lucky for the pioneering work of White, his insistence on casting himself as a ‘gay’ writer, even if it continues to harm his entry into the upper echelon of global literary talents…[City Boy] offers a valuable glimpse into the mind of an indispensable writer and critic, one whose obsessions -- with his city, with other artists, and especially with himself -- help to demystify a fascinating moment in culture and time.”—Buffalo News

“Instead of imagining that far-fetched, science-fiction-based ideas like time machines will ever become a reality, most of us rely on books and movies to take us to places we will either never get to visit, or missed out on entirely. The 1960s and 70s were a pivotal time for gay men, a time when homosexuals made history by redefining their role in society at large by standing up for the basic human rights we enjoy today – and then there's all that rampant, unbridled sex on the Chelsea piers. Popular gay historian, novelist, memoirist and survivor Edmund White takes us there in style in City Boy…. In his own classy, restrained, inimitable style, Edmund White presents graceful ruminations on an ungraceful time as one forgotten decade casts a long shadow on the one that followed. Simply put, this book is a gem, and if time travel were indeed a possibility, White would make ...

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition (September 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1608192342
• ISBN-13: 978-1608192342
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #635,486 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 34 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars New York Days -- And Nights September 30, 2009

By H. F. Corbin TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

In Edmund White's latest book he fleshes out-- no pun intended-- material he has covered previously in MY LIVES, the time he spent in New York in the 1960's and 70's. It was the time that Brad Gooch has labeled "the golden age of promiscuity" in his novel by the same name and that Susan Sontag-- one of the people White writes extensively about-- describes as the only time in human history when people "were free to have sex when and how they wanted," because of access to birth control pills and before the advent of AIDS. Sontag wrote a recommendation for White's groundbreaking novel A BOY'S OWN STORY but asked that her blurb be removed from editions that appeared after she severed her friendship with him because he modeled a character on her in his novel CARACOLE, the only White novel that I have never been able to read. Besides Sontag, he writes about dozens of people he knew during this period: Robert Mapplethorpe, who used the N word; William Burroughs, whom White deliciously describes as having "the look of an unsuccessful Kansas Undertaker"; Jasper Johns; Thom Gunn; Lillian Hellman; John Ashberry; James Merrill et al. Never having met any of these people-- getting Mapplethorpe to sign a book doesn't count-- I have no idea whether or not White's descriptions of these individuals are accurate nor not. He certainly convinces you, however, that they are. Since White is now as famous as many of the people he discusses, he can hardly be called a name-dropper, a word, as he tells us, that does not exist in the French language.

White also chronicles his days at Time-Life as well as other dull jobs and of course his nights of sex as well: "We tried to trick every night, if we could do it efficiently, but we reserved the weekends for our serious hunting sorties." He certainly is not shy about what he calls his self-hatred and low self-esteem and wonders about his "impulses toward treachery, especially toward people who's helped me and befriended me. A BOY'S OWN STORY ends with the boy (me) betraying his teacher, a man with whom he had sex."

White writes beautifully-- as he always does on any subject-- about lovers versus friends with friendship the winner: "I always placed a high value on friendship, but even I had no way of guessing back then that it was more fun to get drunk with a friend than with a lover. Love is a source of anxiety until it is a source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit." In the 1970's the New Yorkers White knew separated love, friendship and sex. "The division of labor gave the starring role to friendship."

In the closing pages of CITY BOY White discusses the advent of AIDS, his being the first president of GMHC and Larry Kramer's founding of ACT UP-- "We were naive, but there was no way to be sophisticated about an unprecedented plague"-- and says simply that AIDS killed most of his circle, a statement that many of us far away from New York understand all too well. I cannot call up my best and oldest friend for many years and tell him to read Edmund White's latest book since he died in the first wave of AIDS-related deaths while the President of the United States remained silent.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The City and Man That Never Sleeps October 20, 2009

By Eric Anderson

Format:Hardcover

White's new memoir is extremely engaging, funny and entertaining. It contains a wealth of gem-like anecdotes. White encountered many of NYC's most important cultural and literary figures of the 60s and 70s period that he writes about. From Lillian Hellman to Harold Brodkey to Susan Sontag we are given his personal insights to what these vivacious personalities were actually like. I'll never be able to think of Peggy Guggenheim in the same way again after reading White's portrait of her. But in addition to writing about his many successes and exciting encounters during this time, the author also details the professional hardship of being a new writer in a city swarming with aspiring artists and the many failures he had to endure before finding success.

White also gives an interesting analysis of the evolving attitudes about homosexuality. He considers how gay people saw themselves in the 60s and 70s in relation to now. He also creates an incredibly dynamic account of NYC itself. He shows how it changed from a dilapidated hobbling metropolis to the booming cash rich centre and tourist destination that it'd become in the 80s. City Boy is an important chronicle of a certain period of time, but it is also a wickedly enjoyable read. Once you pick it up, you won't want to put it down until finishing the last page.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars White at His Best December 8, 2010

By James V. Stoecker

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have never been much of a fan of Edmund White's fiction. In my view, too self consciously arty, too vague and nebulous. But his non-fiction is another matter. And this latest memoir is really White at his best. The prose flows as he describes his life in the 60s and 70s in New York, then the center of artistic endeavor in the US. Unlike his novels, here his narrative hangs together beautifully and compels his story forward.