17 Facts About Edmund White

Edmund White grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and attended the exclusive Cranbrook School in Michigan as a boy.

Edmund White majored in Chinese at the University of Michigan.

Edmund White declined admission to Harvard University's Chinese doctoral program in favor of following a lover to New York.

Edmund White wrote books and plays while a youth, including one unpublished novel titled Mrs Morrigan.

From 1980 to 1981, Edmund White was a member of a gay writers' group, The Violet Quill, which met briefly during that period, and included Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano.

In 1980, Edmund White brought out States of Desire, a survey of some aspects of gay life in America.

Several characters in the latter novel are recognizably based on well-known people from Edmund White's New York-centered literary and artistic milieu.

Edmund White moved there initially for one year in 1983 via the Guggenheim Fellowship for writing he had received, but took such a liking to Paris "with its drizzle, as cool, grey and luxurious as chinchilla," that he stayed there for longer.

Edmund White published Genet: a biography, Our Paris: sketches from memory, Marcel Proust, The Flaneur: a stroll through the paradoxes of Paris and Rimbaud.

Edmund White spent seven years writing the biography of Genet.

Edmund White taught at Brown University in the early 90s, and in 1999 became professor of creative writing in Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts.

Edmund White is frequently noted as a major influence on gay American writers and literature.

Edmund White's favorite living writers in the early 1970s were Vladimir Nabokov and Christopher Isherwood.

Edmund White was present at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 when the Stonewall uprising began.

Edmund White is gay and an atheist, though he was reared as a Christian Scientist.

Edmund White is in a long-term open relationship with the American writer Michael Carroll, living with him from 1995 onward.

In June 2012, Carroll reported that Edmund White was making a "remarkable" recovery after suffering two strokes in previous months.