When Edmund White left the Midwest after college he had an opportunity to pursue a Ph.D. at Harvard. Instead, he followed a lover to New York City. Bristling with wit and energy. City Boy chronicles the remarkable life he made for himself in the 1960s and '70s, in a city economically devastated but incandescent with art and ideas.<BR>White arrives in New York broke and unknown, struggling to express himself as a gay man even as he holds out hope of being "cured." Present at the Stonewall uprising in 1969, White witnesses the start of the gay movement and gradually begins to embrace his identity. And after a first meeting with James Merrill, to whom he nervously reads aloud from his unpublished novel, White encounters icons from Elizabeth Bishop to William Burroughs, Susan Sontag to Jasper Johns. Absorbing and filtering these heady influences, White finds his own unique artistic voice just as the city's high culture explodes in creativity. Within a decade of his first publication, White writes A Boy's Own Story, the autobiographical novel that will make him the most celebrated gay writer in the world.<BR>Recalling life in a more sordid Manhattan, in an era of transformation, White records his ambitions and desires, remembers lovers and literary heroes. and displays the wit, candor, and generosity that have defined his unique voice over the decades.