Literature
Edmund White
1940–2025 · novelist, memoirist, biographer, essayist
Pioneering gay novelist of A Boy's Own Story who finished high school at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, where he wrote his first two novels.
- Born
Cincinnati, Ohio- Died
New York City
aged 85- Birth name
- Edmund Valentine White III
- Detroit years
- 1955–1958
- Field
- Literature
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Born in Cincinnati and raised mostly near Chicago, White was sent in the middle of his sophomore year to Cranbrook School, the boarding school on the Cranbrook campus in Bloomfield Hills north of Detroit. He was an honors student there and, while still a teenager, wrote two novels, one of them his first gay novel. He graduated in 1958 and went on to study Chinese at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In New York he became a central figure of post-Stonewall gay literature with the semi-autobiographical trilogy that began with A Boy's Own Story (1982), a co-founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis, and the author of acclaimed biographies of Jean Genet, Proust and Rimbaud.
Highlights
- A Boy's Own Story (1982), a landmark of gay American fiction
- National Book Critics Circle Award for his biography Genet (1993)
- Co-founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis
- Cranbrook School graduate, class of 1958
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 1
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Studied here · 1955–1958
Cranbrook School
The boarding school where he was an honors student and wrote his first two novels.