Edmund White: The Burning World

by StephenBarber (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1999

  $3.25

  In his work Edmund White has explored sex and the human body and the city and its sensations and primarily the mercurial evanescence of life and the connection between dying and creativity. Barber documents White's life from his early childhood (recreated in A Boy's Own Story ) through his twenties, both in 1962 arriving in New York from the Mid-West which was like going from the 19th to the 20th centuries and in 1969 he participated in the Stonewall riots against homophobic persecution, his life in New York in the seventies and his travelling around North America in the late 1970s to research and write States of Desire , his eye-witness account of the gay male community in a moment of explosive development. In 1983 White moved from New York to Paris with his love John Purcell and a whole new life opened up for him. It was here he met many famous people from Michael Foucault and Herve Guibert through Bruce Chatwin. Edmund White's life acts as a magnificent companion to his novels and sheds light on them.

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $4.09

  'Stephen Barber's biography of Edmund White is both a work of literary merit and the ideal companion to its subject's life and achievements . . . profoundly insightful . . . illuminating . . . 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 rapport with a constantly exciting subject' The Times

  'He calls it a biography ; I believe it to be something rarer than this. It is simultaneously a presentation of Edmund White's actual life and oeuvre, with specific details and ananalyses, and of a more general creative spirit being acted on by a time, a society, a culture and in turn giving back to it, even affecting it . . . Stephen Barber is a cultural historian of real distinction . . . and he gives us here superb, rich, unjudgemental portraits of multi-stranded societies at given times . . . A brilliant and often profound book . . . he rises to heights of which his subject (and friend) must surely himself be proud' Independent on Sunday