You are hereWriters At Work: Edmund White

Writers At Work: Edmund White

Start: Mon, 02/22/2010 - 6:30pm

End: Mon, 02/22/2010 - 8:00pm

Author: Edmund White, esteemed novelist and cultural critic, is the author of many books, including the autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story; a previous memoir, My Lives; a biography of poet Arthur Rimbaud. White lives in New York City and teaches writing at Princeton University.

What: Edmund White will discuss City Boy, his critically acclaimed new memoir. When Edmund White left the Midwest after college he had an opportunity to pursue a PhD at Harvard; instead, he followed a lover to New York City. CITY BOY: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ‘70s is at once a memoir of the social and sexual lives of New York’s cultural and intellectual in-crowd and White’s own story of his twenties and thirties and his formation as an author.

White arrives in New York broke and unknown, struggling to express himself as a gay man. New York isn’t faring much better; it was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city where garbage piled up during the long strikes of the sanitation workers and when a major blackout led to days and days of looting. White and his friends wore whistles around their necks so they could summon help from other gay men when they were attacked by the gangs when they left Greenwich Village on their way to the West Side leather bars. A time of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult, White describes encounters with famous names and cultural icons from James Merrill to Elizabeth Bishop to William Burroughs; Harold Brodkey to Susan Sontag to Jasper Johns. Present at the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, White witnesses the start of the gay movement. And within a decade of his first publication, White writes A Boy’s Own Story, the autobiographical novel that will make him America’s most celebrated gay writer.

Recalling life in a more sordid Manhattan in an era of transformation, White records his ambitions and desires, remembers lovers and literary heroes. CITY BOY is a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and a place.

This event is part of the Writers At Work speaker series organized by Kansas City novelist Whitney Terrell and co-sponsored by Chris Davis and the English Department at the University Of Missouri - Kansas City.

Where: Kansas City Public Library, Central Branch, Helzberg Auditorium, 14 W 10th Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64105

When: Monday, February 22, 2010, 6:30 PM.

Admission: Complimentary and open to the public. Reservations requested, please call the Kansas City Public Library at (816) 701-3407.

Writers' books are available for purchase at events from Rainy Day Books.

Location:

Kansas City Public Library, Central Branch, Helzberg Auditorium
14 W 10th Street
Kansas City, Missouri 64105