Beautiful Room is Empty

Author(s): Edmund White

Gay & Bi Male Fiction

When the narrator 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.
Moving with sinuous ease from a claustrophobic Midwestern college town in the 1950s to Greenwich Village on the night of the Stonewall rebellion, Edmund White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel is a portrait of the artist as a young gay man finding his way within a country that has no room for sexual dissidents.


Product Information

"With intelligence, candor, humor—and anger—White explores the most insidious aspects of oppression.... An impressive novel."—Washington Post book World

General Fields

  • : 9780679755401
  • : Vintage US
  • : Vintage US
  • : 0.208
  • : March 2002
  • : 1.6 Centimeters X 13.3 Centimeters X 20.1 Centimeters
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : 240
  • : 813/.54
  • : 0203
  • : PAPERBACK
  • : Edmund White