A Boy's Own Story (Modern Library Classics)

A Boy's Own Story (Modern Library Classics)

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For more than two decades, Edmund White has been widely recognized as America’s preeminent gay writer. “He has a novelist’s eye for the telling detail or the remarkable phrase and, like Proust himself, concentrates upon the minutiae of the past so that it might live again,” wrote <i>The New York Times Book Review</i>. “White possesses the rare combination of a po-etic sense of language and an ironic sense of humor,” declared <i>Newsweek</i>. “[He] is unquestionably the foremost American gay novelist.” Commemorating the twentieth anni-versary of <i>A Boy’s Own Story</i>, this Modern Library edition presents White’s autobiographical novel together with an Introduction by prizewinning novelist Allan Gurganus and a new Afterword by the author himself.<br><br><i>A Boy’s Own Story</i>, with equal parts stunning lyricism and unabashed humor, traces a nameless narrator’s coming-of-age in the 1950s. Struggling with his homosexuality, the narrator seeks the consolations of a fantastic imagination and fills his head with romantic expectations (“I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love.”) His distant, divorced parents exacerbate his hunger for emotional connection, and he endures the unhelpful attentions of a priest and a psychoanalyst. In time, he recognizes the need to be loved by the men in his life and, in the surprising conclusion, escapes his childhood forever with one unforgettable act.<br><br>“With <i>A Boy’s Own Story</i>, American literature is larger by one classic novel,” wrote <i>The Washington Post Book World</i>. “No reader, straight or gay . . . can fail to experience shock after shock of recognition in these pages, and few, I would bet, will be able to withhold a one-to-one sympathy from the unnamed narrator, even when he is being, by the standards of only yesterday, ‘shocking.’”