Edmund White was most known for the autobiographical novel "A Boy's Own Story" from 1982 and several other books that thematized homosexuals' life experiences, including "The Beautiful Room Is Empty" and "The Farewell Symphony".
White came to be an influential author for even a later generation of homosexual authors.
In a TT interview from 2014, when White visited the Stockholm Literature Festival, cultural writer Stefan Ingvarsson described him as "a self-evident reference point":
- He is the most important describer of male homosexuality in the Western world.
Edmund White's breakthrough came in 1977 with "The Joy of Gay Sex", a sex manual that he wrote together with his psychiatrist Charles Silverstein.
Homosexual fiction before that, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, was written for heterosexual readers. But we wanted to address a homosexual readership and that meant everything. We didn't need to explain what Fire Island was, he said in an interview, according to The Guardian.
