Edmund White Edmund Valentine White III (born January 13, 1940) is a novelist, short-story writer and critic. He is also currently a fiction writing teacher and the director of creative writing at Princeton University. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he largely grew up in Chicago and later worked in New York as a journalist. From 1983 to 1990 he lived in France. His best-known work is perhaps A Boy's Own Story, the first volume of an autobiographical-fiction trilogy that continued with The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, describing stages in the life of a gay man from boyhood to middle age. Most of his fictional work is set in a contemporary gay milieu, although his later work draws on a broader range of themes. He has also been influential as a literary and cultural critic, particularly on gay issues, and has been open in his discussion of his HIV-positive status for two decades. He recently published an autobiography entitled My Lives, at the age of sixty-five.
