Edmund White

Princeton University

A life of Lorenzo Da Ponte

2013-2014: Fall

Edmund White has published some 25 books, including novels, essays, travel books, biographies, plays and autobiographies. He is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. He has been made an officer in the French order of Arts and Letters and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his biography of Jean Genet. He has also published short biographies of Marcel Proust and Rimbaud, for which he won the Premio Internazionale Mondello in Sicily. His novel Hotel de Dream is about an episode in the life of Stephen Crane; his novel Fanny is about Frances Trollope (mother of the author) and Frances Wright, the Scottish founder of an American utopia. He has taught at Yale, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and New York University, where he was director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. His best-known novel is A Boy's Own Story. He also won some attention for his autobiographies, My Lives and City Boy (nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award). Next year Bloomsbury will publish Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris. He frequently publishes in the New York Review of Books.