An irresistible literary treat: a memoir of the social and
sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual
in-crowd in the tumultuous 1970s, from acclaimed author
Edmund White.
In the New Y ork of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and
in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes
of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail
party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at
the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the
warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the
New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of
enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-
holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy’s Own Story
with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur,
this is the story of White’s years in 1970s New York,
bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and
Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the
burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. I t’s a
moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place,
full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.
An esteemed novelist and cultural critic, Edmund White is
the author of many books, including the autobiographical
novel A Boy’s Own Story; a previous memoir, My Lives; and
most recently a biography of poet Arthur Rimbaud. White
lives in New York City and teaches writing at Princeton
University.
An irresistible literary treat: a memoir of the social and
sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual
in-crowd in the tumultuous 1970s, from acclaimed author
Edmund White.
In the New Y ork of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and
in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes
of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail
party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at
the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the
warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the
New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of
enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-
holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy’s Own Story
with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur,
this is the story of White’s years in 1970s New York,
bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and
Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the
burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. I t’s a
moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place,
full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.
“[A] moving chronicle . . . that peacock’s tail, those
stag’s antlers—they’re here, to be sure, but so are
vulnerability, doubt, failure and long years toiling at the
sort of cruddy day jobs that most literary writers know all
too well . . . In City Boy, White is amusing and raucous as
ever but he also lets the mask slip…his losses and
struggles, as consequence, seems less sculpted, but more
real . . . Some stories don’t need to be embellished to
glow.”—The New York Times Book Review
"An open-throttled tour of New York City during the bad old
days of the 1960s and early '70s . . . it's all here in
exacting and eye-popping detail . . . There is a great deal
of sex and gossip in City Boy, but it is also a minor-key
account of Mr. White's coming of age as a writer . . . City
Boy is Mr. White's second memoir in three years, and a
great deal of his fiction has been autobiographical. You
get the sense of a writer slowly peeling his life like an
artichoke, letting only a few stray leaves go at a
time . . . This one is salty and buttery, for sure. Mr.
White's 'Oh, come on, guys' meekness has vanished into thin
air."—The New York Times
"Chronicl[es]Gotham’s cultural highs and lows during those
two heady and iconic decades . . .
fleshing out our notion of how vital a period the ’60s
and ’70s were . . . Since White is a born raconteur, his
gimlet-eyed anecdotes about celebrities of the era are as
tangy as blood orange sorbet served after lobster
Thermidor . . . [he] matches his talent for journalism with
brilliant imagistic prose."—Gay City News
"City Boy is an amazing memoir of White’s hunger for
literary fame—for publication even—and intellectual esteem
in the superheated creative world of ’60s and ’70s New
York. His sketches of writers and artists, including
everyone from poets James Merrill and John Ashbery to
artist Robert Wilson and editor Robert Gottlieb, are full
of bon mots, sharply observed details, and great honesty
about his own desires for love and esteem. City Boy vividly
brings to life the sheer squalor of life in 1970s New
York . . . A wonderful raconteur with a well-stocked fund
of anecdotes and observations, White’s writings reveal much
about alliances, alignments, and personalities from a
vanished world that still echo strongly in our own."—This
Week in New York
"[An] exuberant, thoughtful memoir. Arriving in 1962 and
determined to be famous, [Edmund White] found a job in
publishing and got to work on his dream. Away from the
office, he dedicated his energy to meeting people (some
famous, some not) and, of course, having sex with lots and
lots of men. Ambition, amphetamines, neurosis and an era
when New York vibrated with desire combined for heady times
in his young life . . . White wrestled with self-acceptance
as he pursued therapy to reorient himself for a (never-to-
be) heterosexual marriage; he admits he was so consumed
with internalized self-loathing that he didn't have a clear
idea of how he looked. Others, however, did not miss the
handsome, eager man in all his '60s and '70s glory, and he
made friends easily. White's affectionate yet candid
portraits of literary celebrities Richard Howard, Harold
Brodkey and Susan Sontag celebrate those friendships, with
the eminences coming across as quite distinct from their
forbidding pubic personas, even lovable. White got around
in less elevated circles too. He saw a lifetime of
scandalous acting out that bubbles up in passing remarks
like, 'When gay men say in their personals, 'No drama
queens, please,' they are trying to avoid someone like
Coleman.' Sparkling cameo appearances by the likes of
Truman Capote, Robert Mapplethorpe and Fran Lebowitz expand
the feeling that artistic Manhattan then was a very
different place than it is today. All fun aside, the
gadabout boulevardier at some point had to take a back seat
to the fiercely ambitious emerging writer. White's vivid
analysis of his artistic struggles and literary progress
during these years is like a master class for other
writers. As he notes, the years of uncertainty helped him
develop and refine his themes, otherwise he 'would never
have turned toward writing with a burning desire to
confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of
others.' Many readers of his landmark novel, A Boy's Own
Story, will sit up at attention when he links his goal of
writing 'a modern tragedy in which there were two choices
and both were bad' to Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen.
That like-minded connection to Bowen also serves to explain
his insistence that any truly satisfying work of literature
must embrace a mysterious element of charm. Let it be known
that White's memoir takes that lesson to heart and has
charm to burn."—John McFarland, Shelf Awareness
"A graceful memoir of a decidedly ungraceful time in the
life of New York City . . . A welcome port
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