Early Life and Studies
Edmund Valentine White was born on 13 January 1940, in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Incestuous feelings existed in White's family; his mother was attracted to him. White spoke of his own sexual attraction to his father in an interview: "I think with my father he was somebody who every eye in the family was focused on and he was a sort of a tyrant and nice-looking, the source of all power, money, happiness, and he was implacable and difficult. He was always spoken of in sexual terms, in the sense he left our mother for a much younger woman who was very sexy but had nothing else going for her. He was a famous womanizer. And he slept with my sister!" He has also stated: "Writing has always been my recourse when I've tried to make sense of my experience or when it's been very painful. When I was 15 years old, I wrote my first (unpublished) novel about being gay, at a time when there were no other gay novels. So I was really inventing a genre, and it was a way of administering a therapy to myself, I suppose."
White largely grew up in Chicago. He attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan as a boy. Afterwards he studied Chinese at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1962.
Read more about this topic: Edmund White
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or studies:
“Probably more than youngsters at any age, early adolescents expect the adults they care about to demonstrate the virtues they want demonstrated. They also tend to expect adults they admire to be absolutely perfect. When adults disappoint them, they can be critical and intolerant.”
—The Lions Clubs International and the Quest Nation. The Surprising Years, I, ch.4 (1985)
“Ecouraging a child means that one or more of the following critical life messages are coming through, either by word or by action: I believe in you, I trust you, I know you can handle this, You are listened to, You are cared for, You are very important to me.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“[B]y going to the College [William and Mary] I shall get a more universal Acquaintance, which may hereafter be serviceable to me; and I suppose I can pursue my Studies in the Greek and Latin as well there as here, and likewise learn something of the Mathematics.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)