Edmund White: The Burning World (Hardcover)

by Stephen Barber (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From 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 pacedAand more revealingAbut 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 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Description
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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (November 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312199740
• ISBN-13: 978-0312199746
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,012,244 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent companion to the work of a great gay writer, July 31, 2000

By A Customer

This is a great literary biography. It combines solid research into the life and work of Edmund White, one of the most imaginative and passionate gay writers of the last half century, with the kind of human touches that bring biography alive. Stephen Barber moves effortlessly from White's life to his work and back again, painting a fascinating portrait not only of White's own adventures and career, but providing the reader with profound insights into the bigger picture of gay life and culture in America and Paris, from Stonewall to AIDS and beyond. The discussion of White's writing stays fresh and relevant to his literary ideals and the context of his life - it makes you want to go back and read his books all over again. The book is also fairly balanced - it avoids taking sides in the bitter debates that have raged over what gay male culture and identity should be, and instead tries to present a range of different perspectives and possibilities. Readable, entertaining, informative and thought-provoking - I highly recommend this book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptionally Well-Pitched Critical Biography of White, December 11, 2001

By	Jeremy Reed (London, NW3) - See all my reviews

Edmund White: The Burning World, by Stephen Barber

Edmund White's iconic status within a gay ethos extends far beyond those defined boundaries to his acceptance by the literary world as one of the major writers of our times. White's elegantly stylised novels, each employing a language particular to a time and place, as well as his non-fiction preoccupations as biographer to Genet and Proust, have led to the creation of an integral body of work. White's writings are as individual as they are vital to our reading of mortality in the late 20th century.

Stephen Barber's exceptionally well-pitched critical biography of White is both a work of literary merit and the ideal companion to its subject's life and achievements. Barber has for several years been one of our best critical writers on the nature of the modern city. The Burning World is creative criticism at its best, and Barber's understanding of the city and its sensations as determining creative language is central to his thesis on White's fiction.

During his formative writing years in a 1960's New York, White wrote five unpublished novels before Forgetting Elena was accepted for publication in 1972. Barber interestingly points to Fire Island being the inspirational site to this work, and to White's obsession with islands in general as representing the precinct in which to set a novel. Two more of his books, Nocturnes For The King of Naples, and Caracole, were to be less specifically identified with place, but to occupy undisclosed insular settings.

Barber rightly sees White's first four novels, with their rich textured poetic prose, as 'a unique document of the imagination in its compulsive interaction with the human body.' It was the third of these books, A Boy's Own Story 1982, which won White not only critical acclaim but a confirmed gay readership.

Crucial to Barber in the development of White as a person and writer was his move to Paris in 1983, the city in which he continues to live and write for half of each year. White, who was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1985, for a while considered his death to be imminent. Yet he found Paris sufficiently psychologically regenerative to encourage him to form new relationships, and to write new books. One of these was the elegiac The Beautiful Room Is Empty, a novel in which White first employed the medium of stripped down communicative prose which he continues to use today.

Another legacy of White's Paris years, begun in 1986 and completed seven years later was his monumental 700 page study of the French writer and criminal Jean Genet. Barber is profoundly insightful on White's grand Genet biography, and provides an illuminating commentary on the interactive chemistry triggered by one great writer overhauling the other's complex and elusive life.

Barber sensitively highlights White's most enduring relationships, including the one with Hubert Sorin, whose death from AIDS in 1993 was to leave White devastated. White's ability to keep on endlessly recreating himself, and adapting to the survival measures necessary for a gay man to outlive an AIDS generation, proves the pivot on which Barber's study rests.

This is a book to be recommended, not only to Edmund White's many readers, but to those who care for the valency of a new critical language finding its rapport with a constantly exciting subject.

Jeremy Reed

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Informative survey of White's life, June 1, 2000

By	"jdtx" (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews

My first impression, upon picking up this biography of Edmund White, was that the Stephen Barber's writing is terribly over-wrought -- the introduction of the book, in which Barber tries to explain White's importance to contemporary literature, is some of the purplest prose I've read in a long time.

But Barber's writing improves markedly when he begins telling the story of White's life. The most interesting aspect of the book, to me, is Barber's descriptions of White's early fictional efforts, and his writing habits; you'll read about the novel White wrote in high school; you'll learn that White was often drunk or stoned when he wrote his early novels, and that even to this day White generally limits himself to writing a few pages per day in the expensive blank books he purchases from a Paris stationer. You'll read about White's encounters with writers as diverse as Michel Foucault, Vladimir Nabokov (who named White as one of his favorite young novelists, much to White's surprise), and Michael Ondaatje (whose own writing habits are similar to White's). Your impression, gleaned from White's novels, that he is an extremely decent person who is quite fallible but gifted with an immense talent, will be confirmed by Barber's account. Also surprising is Barber's description of how sexually voracious White was from a very early age. Apparently White felt the need to tone down his self-depiction in "A Boy's Own Story," to make his character seem more representative of typical adolescents.

In summary, this is a worthy biography of White, once you get past the somewhat amateurish writing style (which is why I'm giving it only four stars). But you shouldn't order it unless you're very interested in White -- otherwise, you will learn enough about White from his own novels.