White has also written hundreds of book reviews and essays for publications including the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the Times Literary Supplement (London). Colm Tóibín, writing for the New York Review of Books, sees in the biographies of Genet, Proust, and Rimbaud “a dotted line to the gay past” and remarks that White has become “a passionate and graceful witness to his own life, to the life of New York itself, and to the changing mores of what became the gay community.” His work, beginning in 1973 with publication of Forgetting Elena and continuing through his latest novel, Jack Holmes and His Friend, is distinguished throughout by a candor and outspokenness on behalf of the generation of gay men who witnessed the Stonewall uprising and the effects of the AIDS epidemic. In all, White is author of more than 25 books. White has also written short biographies of iconic French writers Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud, as well as the novel Hotel de Dream, which imagines the last days and final lost work of American writer Stephen Crane. White’s book, which earned the National Book Critics Circle Award, shows Genet in all his permutations: poet, dandy, homosexual, thief, a “thug of genius,” as Simone de Beauvoir called him. Edmund White’s biography of Jean Genet remains the definitive study of one of the most notorious figures of twentieth-century literature.
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