How groundbreaking gay author Edmund White paved the way for other writers

NEW YORK (AP) — Andrew Sean Greer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, remembers the first time he read Edmund White. It was the summer of 1989, he was beginning his second year at Brown University and he had just come out.

Having learned that White would be teaching at Brown, he found a copy of White’s celebrated coming-of-age novel, “A Boy’s Own Story.”

“I’d never read anything like it — nobody had — and what strikes me looking back is the lack of shame or self-hatred or misery...