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‘Edmund White’s candid memoir of New York’s gay scene in the sixties and seventies is packed with frequently salacious anecdotes about the rich, the famous and the gifted. In the end, though, it is the city itself that steals the show: crime-ridden, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, all but impossible to live in, but vibrantly alive’ London Review of Books

‘City Boy is gossipy elegant and endlessly quotable, an intriguing obituary to a time and place that no longer exists’ Word Magazine

‘Edmund White has a wonderful chuckle, full of active mischief and helpless glee … a gifted, promiscuous, scholarly, sociable young gay writer … Beguiling’ Observer

‘New York is evoked with a cinematic immediacy, especially its “grungy, dangerous, bankrupt” character in the mid-1970s … City Boy is, in an important sense, a book about friendship, its proximity to and differences from romance, and its significance in the lives of gay men … His ability to reflect on his past with candour and wit remains exemplary’ Times Literary Supplement

‘City Boy, plain-spoken and knowing, is a survivor’s tale, a missive from one of those antlered boys of that era to the others who are gone: this is who we were, this is how it was, this was our city’ New York Times Books Review

‘White has an unerring eye for the symptoms of the authorial egotism and, because he freely admits to his own, serves it up as a pure comedy … Every page has a great joke or description’ Evening Standard

‘A rip-roaring, riotous hoot from start to finish … a stud-studded and gloriously gossipy catalogue of all his uber-cool arty pals and his own thrilling exploits in the heady underworld of pre-AIDS gaydom’ Dazed & Confused

‘As much as the book is delicious gossip, it’s also a narrative of understanding and friendship, a celebration of destiny they all shared by being alive in a poor and decaying and free and lusty New York for two amazing decades’ Irish Times

‘Edmund White, a master of the erotic confession, is our most accomplished triathlete of prose—a novelist, biographer, and memoirist. Truly, no other American writer of my generation manages to be all three with such personal passion and veracity.

The fiercely defiant A Boy’s Own Story remains the coming-of-age novel that has the deepest resonance for me—notwithstanding that it’s about a gay boy coming of age, and I’m straight. (No one who honestly remembers being a sensitive young man can fail to identify with the universal longing, or the frustration and the anger, underlying this semiautobiographical novel.) And White’s recent biography of the mercurial and much misunderstood Rimbaud is fittingly devastating and succinct—’fittingly,’ because the outcast poet’s life was tragic and brief. Now comes a bold, penetrating companion to White’s My Lives—an earlier, bittersweet memoir.

In City Boy, the memoirist examines his life in New York in the 1960s and ’70s; not only were these vital years for White’s own gay liberation, but City Boy is also the story of White’s literary emergence—his struggles and ambitions as a writer. There is the bracing sexual candor and explicitness White is justly famous for; as he says, ‘What we desire is crucial to who we are.’ But what is most unforgettable are the piercing self-portraits of the young writer who describes himself as ‘desperate for recognition,’ and the overwhelming panoply of older, often legendary writers White meets along the way. (‘I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought.’)

This splendid book is at once fascinating social history and sublimely detailed gossip. Young gay readers who don’t know what it was like to be gay in New York in the ’60s and ’70s should devour it; those straight readers who are somehow still unfriendly to homosexuality must open their eyes and read every word of City Boy, too. As for those of us, gay and straight, who have long admired Edmund White, this memoir is a wise and humane treatise on the delicate