The Beautiful Room Is Empty - Softcover

White, Edmund

3.93

3,261 ratings by Goodreads

9780345351517: The Beautiful Room Is Empty

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345351517 ISBN 13: 9780345351517

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1989

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The hero experienced the pains of growing out of adolescence and struggles to come to terms with his homosexuality and desire for power as society moves from the constrained 1950s to the expressive 1960s

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About the Author:

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1940. His fiction includes the autobiographical trilogy A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony, as well as Caracole, Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and Skinned 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 America--States of Desire--and Our Paris. He is an officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and teaches at Princeton University. He lives in New York City.

From the Inside Flap:

rator 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
From the Trade Paperback edition.

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