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Imserba Webstore - City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
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List Price: $26.00
Our Price: $17.16
Your Save: $ 8.84 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Bloomsbury USA
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781596914025
Feature: ISBN13: 9781596914025
ISBN: 1596914025
Label: Bloomsbury USA
Manufacturer: Bloomsbury USA
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: 2009-09-29
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Release Date: 2009-09-29
Studio: Bloomsbury USA
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Editorial Reviews:
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An irresistible literary treat: a memoir of the social and sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual in-crowd in the tumultuous 1970s, from acclaimed author Edmund White. In the New Y ork of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy’s Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White’s years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. I t’s a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons. An esteemed novelist and cultural critic, Edmund White is the author of many books, including the autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story; a previous memoir, My Lives; and most recently a biography of poet Arthur Rimbaud. White lives in New York City and teaches writing at Princeton University. An irresistible literary treat: a memoir of the social and sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual in-crowd in the tumultuous 1970s, from acclaimed author Edmund White. In the New Y ork of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy’s Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White’s years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. I t’s a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons. “[A] moving chronicle . . . that peacock’s tail, those stag’s antlers—they’re here, to be sure, but so are vulnerability, doubt, failure and long years toiling at the sort of cruddy day jobs that most literary writers know all too well . . . In City Boy, White is amusing and raucous as ever but he also lets the mask slip…his losses and struggles, as consequence, seems less sculpted, but more real . . . Some stories don’t need to be embellished to glow.”—The New York Times Book Review "An open-throttled tour of New York City during the bad old days of the 1960s and early '70s . . . it's all here in exacting and eye-popping detail . . . There is a great deal of sex and gossip in City Boy, but it is also a minor-key account of Mr. White's coming of age as a writer . . . City Boy is Mr. White's second memoir in three years, and a great deal of his fiction has been autobiographical. You get the sense of a writer slowly peeling his life like an artichoke, letting only a few stray leaves go at a time . . . This one is salty and buttery, for sure. Mr. White's 'Oh, come on, guys' meekness has vanished into thin air."—The New York Times "Chronicl[es]Gotham’s cultural highs and lows during those two heady and iconic decades . . . fleshing out our notion of how vital a period the ’60s and ’70s were . . . Since White is a born raconteur, his gimlet-eyed anecdotes about celebrities of the era are as tangy as blood orange sorbet served after lobster Thermidor . . . [he] matches his talent for journalism with brilliant imagistic prose."—Gay City News " City Boy is an amazing memoir of White’s hunger for literary fame—for publication even—and intellectual esteem in the superheated creative world of ’60s and ’70s New York. His sketches of writers and artists, including everyone from poets James Merrill and John Ashbery to artist Robert Wilson and editor Robert Gottlieb, are full of bon mots, sharply observed details, and great honesty about his own desires for love and esteem. City Boy vividly brings to life the sheer squalor of life in 1970s New York . . . A wonderful raconteur with a well-stocked fund of anecdotes and observations, White’s writings reveal much about alliances, alignments, and personalities from a vanished world that still echo strongly in our own."— This Week in New York
"[An] exuberant, thoughtful memoir. Arriving in 1962 and determined to be famous, [Edmund White] found a job in publishing and got to work on his dream. Away from the office, he dedicated his energy to meeting people (some famous, some not) and, of course, having sex with lots and lots of men. Ambition, amphetamines, neurosis and an era when New York vibrated with desire combined for heady times in his young life . . . White wrestled with self-acceptance as he pursued therapy to reorient himself for a (never-to-be) heterosexual marriage; he admits he was so consumed with internalized self-loathing that he didn't have a clear idea of how he looked. Others, however, did not miss the handsome, eager man in all his '60s and '70s glory, and he made friends easily. White's affectionate yet candid portraits of literary celebrities Richard Howard, Harold Brodkey and Susan Sontag celebrate those friendships, with the eminences coming across as quite distinct from their forbidding pubic personas, even lovable. White got around in less elevated circles too. He saw a lifetime of scandalous acting out that bubbles up in passing remarks like, 'When gay men say in their personals, 'No drama queens, please,' they are trying to avoid someone like Coleman.' Sparkling cameo appearances by the likes of Truman Capote, Robert Mapplethorpe and Fran Lebowitz expand the feeling that artistic Manhattan then was a very different place than it is today. All fun aside, the gadabout boulevardier at some point had to take a back seat to the fiercely ambitious emerging writer. White's vivid analysis of his artistic struggles and literary progress during these years is like a master class for other writers. As he notes, the years of uncertainty helped him develop and refine his themes, otherwise he 'would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others.' Many readers of his landmark novel, A Boy's Own Story, will sit up at attention when he links his goal of writing 'a modern tragedy in which there were two choices and both were bad' to Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. That like-minded connection to Bowen also serves to explain his insistence that any truly satisfying work of literature must embrace a mysterious element of charm. Let it be known that White's memoir takes that lesson to heart and has charm to burn."—John McFarland, Shelf Awareness "A graceful memoir of a decidedly ungraceful time in the life of New York City . . . A welcome port
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Meeting An Old Friend - Yet Again
Comment: Reading City Boy is a bit like sitting down with an old friend one has known for years and still - despite hearing similar stories from him each time you meet - feeling closer to him than ever and realizing how much his friendship means to you. White still has the ability to startle, to come out with some revelation about himself that leaves the reader wondering: "Why did he admit that?" We learn from Edmund White: learn to be more honest, more down-to-earth, more tolerant, and more understanding. In City Boy, White's focus changes from the interior to the exterior. Those who read and enjoyed My Lives may be disappointed in City Boy. My Lives was a breathtaking excursion into the life and mind of Edmund White. Each page had the ability to charm or alarm us. City Boy, on the other hand, is more about the world outside, the world of others, the world that White lived in and observed while simultaneously living the life that we all have come to know through his other books. City Boy is an authentic representation of the 60s and 70s and of gay culture during those years, in particular. But if a reader picks up this book hoping for sadly amusing pages about White being led around on a leash or fascinating insights into his real-world relationships with women, one will find City Boy lacking. For someone yearning to have lived through the 60s or 70s and having missed it by a decade or two or three, City Boy should supply a good picture of the times. If someone is seeking a little gossip or some smartly drawn vignettes of famous people, City Boy should please as well. White gives wry observations of James Merrill, Vladimir Nabokov, Jan Morris, John Hohnsbeen, Peggy Guggenheim, William Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Susan Sontag among others. The author who always seems to us as though we've known him forever, this time around has taken the focus outside, writing about the decades he remembers well but through the lens of his movement around the cities: New York, San Francisco, and Paris. As always, White is a class act. At his simplest and least exciting he is always a gentleman, one who deserves the title of "our friend between the covers."
Customer Rating:
Summary: good and dishy
Comment: This is a very good and gossipy book, full of "and then I met" celebrity sketches. The section on people he met in Venice could pass as one of the unwritten chapters from Capote's Answered Prayers. White loves to tell you who's gay and what he did about it.
Many of us grew up closeted in the sticks and we could only dream about going to Manhattan for the culture and partying, but White did it. Of course, for every successful White there were hundreds who failed. This is a tale of Believe in Yourself and you can triumph. It helps if you're witty and good-looking and able to establish great connections.
I enjoyed reading about gay life in Manhattan in the 60s and 70s. But then came the 80s and AIDS ruined everything. The book has great warts-and-all sketches of famous people (Virgil Thompson, Susan Sontag, Mapplethorpe, to name only a few), but there are also a lot of his author friends I had never heard of, and I was easily able to find their works here on amazon.com and to order a few.
This book doesn't make it all seem fun and glamorous. There were bad times, sad times, and that's what makes this book so important in documenting an important era in our culture scene. There are lots of witty observations and sharp cutting truths here. And there are laments for the lost time.
Customer Rating:
Summary: White Fills in the Blanks
Comment: Edmund White has always been one of my favorite writers - and considering I read mostly gay writers I suppose that means he is one of my favorite gay writers. And for that reason I especially enjoyed his reluctant but sincere defense of gay writing against all those closeted types that challenged his so defining himself. Having only met White once, a brief encounter outside a movie theater when I was in the company of Kim Brinster -then the manager of Oscar Wilde Bookshop which I then owned - and White with whomever was then his boyfriend, my only real life impression was that age in both our cases created some resemblance between us. Now there is a tortured sentence, but then, I'm not the writer. Having read White's much longer biographical novels I welcomed the filling in some of the blanks, and for the brevity. My overall impression is that White discounts his achievements somewhat from surprise of having accomplished same. Nonetheless, he is a delightful writer, a wonderful story teller and provides new dimensions to the lives of some of his contemporaries. I hope he will do something similar for the '80s and '90s and in an interview in The Gay & Lesbian Review he appears to indicate that this may be the case. If so, hopefully this publisher will stick with him and it will be forthcoming soon as I only have four years on White and I don't want to miss it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Dark and Fascinating Account of Literary Ambition
Comment: If Edmund White had been a completely different person, he might have enlisted in the military in the 1960's and built a career as a soldier, even as he suspected the true cost of war. Over forty years later, he could have written a memoir about his career, emanating from almost a type of post traumatic stress.
"City Boy" struck me as this type of dispatch, although White's battles were fought as he struggled to develop a literary career in New York during the 1960's and '70's.
After graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in Chinese, White was accepted into a Ph.D. program at Harvard. However, he chose to follow a boyfriend to New York, arriving in 1962. With no contacts in the literary world, White took a boring job at Time-Life Books which he later abandoned to take an extended trip to Rome. While he seemed to have little momentum, White writes, "I was obsessed with being famous--not rich, which held no interest for me, but famous among the top echelons of the cultural elite."
Reading about his life in the 1960's, I would not have bet on White achieving that goal. His first novel, "Forgetting Elena," was published in 1973, and his "breakthrough" novel, "A Boy's Own Story," was not published until 1982. White lived a bohemian existence, surviving on freelance work, developed friends and contacts in literary and cultural circles, and pursued his rapacious sexual appetites in the gay underground. This book contains fascinating accounts of time spent with luminaries such as James Merrill, Truman Capote, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan Sontag, and others. What casts a pall over these stories, however, is how bizarre and unhappy so many of these icons seemed to be as they struggled to maintain careers in a city that runs white-hot with ambition. When you add White's poverty, his struggles to live as an openly gay man, and the death of legions of friends to AIDS, the account resembles a battlefield strewn with collateral damage.
The most hopeful note in this miasma is White's testament to friendship. He would wrap sexual trysts and lovers in disposable paper, while making presents of friends. You get the sense that the friendships were what enabled him to persevere in the midst of so much bleakness.
White has written numerous well-received works of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir and teaches writing at Princeton, so it could be said that he has realized many of his ambitions. The value in this memoir is in telling us the true price of this achievement.
Customer Rating:
Summary: City Boy
Comment: J.E. Barnes reproaches White with the very faults he freely admits; to please Barnes, apparently, an autobiographer would have to indulge in self-glorification from the first page to the last. White is very funny about his youthful shortcomings and any reader who'd ever examined himself or herself would laugh along with the self-satire. "City Boy" is a witty, fascinating look at an era and a city and a culture as most of the reviews in the press and on Amazon attest. Only an envious, homophobic sourpuss like Barnes could take some of the positions he subscribes to-but if you look at his other reviews, you see that Barnes also raps Hemingway and Mark Twain on the knuckles and reserves his highest praise for "Peyton Place." He is also an admirer of old movie stars, pop singers, horror tales and UFOs-in fact, he's had a few "sightings" of his own! Too bad that Barnes's eccentricities lead him to attack so viciously a luminous, entertaining book such as "City Boy."
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