Writer Edmund White to give reading

Celebrated author Edmund White is teaching writing at Furman this spring.

GREENVILLE, S.C.—Edmund White, one of America’s most gifted and celebrated writers, will give a public reading on the Furman University campus Tuesday, May 28 at 7 p.m. in Patrick Lecture Hall of the Townes Science Center.

The reading is free, and a reception with the author will follow.

White, the nation’s best-known gay novelist, is on the Furman campus this spring to teach in the English Department’s “Writing with Writers” course as part of the university’s three-week May Experience semester.

A prolific writer of plays, cultural criticism, short stories and novels, White is most famous for his trilogy of autobiographical fiction about growing up gay in America—A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony.  He has been interviewed in the Paris Review for its “Art of Fiction” series, and regularly writes reviews and cultural commentaries for The New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement in London.

White is also the author of a biography of Jean Genet, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994, as well as a study of Marcel Proust, and a memoir, My Lives.  Having lived in Paris for many years, he now resides in New York and teaches at Princeton University.

Furman English professor Nick Radel just recently published Understanding Edmund White, the first book-length critical study of the author.  The book is published by the University of South Carolina Press and is part of the Understanding American Literature Series.

For more information about White’s reading at Furman, contact Dr. Radel at 864-294-2795 or nick.radel@furman.edu.