City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s was published by Bloomsbury in 2009. The book covers White’s arrival in New York in the early 1960s and his life there through the end of the 1970s — the two decades during which he transformed himself from a Midwestern provincial into one of the city’s major literary figures.
The memoir is populated with remarkable characters: Susan Sontag (brilliant, domineering, generous), Robert Mapplethorpe (beautiful, ambitious, transgressive), James Merrill (elegant, witty, enormously wealthy), and dozens of other writers, artists, and intellectuals who constituted the downtown cultural world of that era. White’s portraits are affectionate but sharp — he admires these people but sees them clearly, including their vanities, cruelties, and self-deceptions.
The sexual narrative is equally vivid. White arrived in New York as a closeted young man and emerged into the post-Stonewall world of openly gay culture. His account of that transformation — the bathhouses, the cruising, the relationships, the political consciousness — is both personal and historical. He was present at the birth of gay liberation, and his memoir serves as first-person testimony about a revolutionary cultural moment.
The literary world White describes has largely vanished — the independent bookstores, the literary magazines, the cocktail parties where writers actually met and influenced each other, the sense that literature mattered to the culture at large. His memoir preserves that world with the vividness of someone who lived in its center.
Collecting City Boy
First edition (Bloomsbury, New York, 2009): Hardcover, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Signed: $30–$60