Pioneering gay author Edmund White dead at 85

NEW YORK — Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Beautiful Room is Empty,” has died.He was 85.White’s death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg, who did not immediately provide additional details.Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence.

He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement, and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the backlash of recent years.A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist.“A Boy’s Own Story” was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature’s commercial appeal.

He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet and books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud.He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates.

He was an encyclopedic reader who absorbed literature worldwide while returning yearly to such favorites as Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Henry Green’s “Nothing.”“Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,” cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The New York Times in 1995.“A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.”In early 1982, just as the public was learning about AIDS, White was among the founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which advocated AIDS ...