National Book Awards Handed To Susan Choi, Arthur Sze And More

11/20/19 (NPR website)

Edmund White won the medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the National Book Awards’ version of a lifetime achievement award.

The 79-year-old White, a trailblazing gay writer, has enjoyed a vast and varied life on the page, tackling biography, fiction, memoir and plenty that trod the unstable boundaries in between. It’s partly that versatility that attracted the National Book Foundation to his work, according to a statement from David Steinberger, the chairman of the foundation’s board of directors.

Director John Waters, who has enjoyed an attention-grabbing career in his own right, explained it a bit differently on stage before handing White his award.

“Edmund White helped start the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982. He’s an AIDS activist, an AIDS survivor and he still loves sex,” Waters said. “He’s written so many top-notch memoirs that My Struggle seems stingy in the details department. He’s pissed off Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal, and the world is a better place for it.”

White himself explained that the path he forged was rarely easy.

“When I started submitting novels in the pre-Stonewall 1960s, my gay subject matter was offensive — especially since I didn’t write about hustlers or criminals or drag queens, but rather about the middle-class guy sharing an office with you. The familiar is more threatening than the exotic,” he recalled. “Years later, various editors would tell me that they’d been moved by my submissions but hadn’t dared accept them lest their colleagues think they themselves were gay.”

“To go from being the most maligned to a highly lauded writer in a mere half-century is a stunning is astonishing indeed,” he added.

(Submitted by Michael Kelly, H.W.)