The Beautiful Room Is Empty: A Novel

(Paperback)

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Description

When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising--and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink--The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.

"With intelligence, candor, humor--and anger--White explores the most insidious aspects of oppression.... An impressive novel."--Washington Post book World

Author Bio

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1940. His fiction includes the autobiographical trilogyA Boys Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty,andThe Farewell Symphony, as well asCaracole, Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples,andSkinned Alive, a collection of short stories. He is also the author of a highly acclaimed biography of Jean Genet, a short study of Proust, a travel book about gay AmericaStates of DesireandOur Paris. He is an officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and teaches at Princeton University. He lives in New York City.