American writer, playwright and essayist Edmund White was praised for his semiautobiographical novels such as the Boy's Story - and literally wrote books about homosexual sex and pioneered the joy of homosexuality - at the age of 85.

His agent, Bill Clegg, confirmed his death to the Guardian on Wednesday.

White has a significant influence on modern gay literature, with LGBTQ+ writing prizes named after him, as well as authors including Garth Greenwell, Édouard Louis, Ocean Vuong, Brandon Taylor and Alexander Chee all noted his importance. He once appeared in the late 1970s and once spoke of his generation: "The gay novels before that, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote were written for straightforward readers. We have readers of gay readers, and it's all different. We don't have to spell out the fire island."

White was born in Ohio in 1940 and grew up in Illinois. He was admitted to Harvard but chose to attend the University of Michigan to stay near his therapist, and he assured White that he could “heal” gays. The decision he will make in the novel. He then moved to New York and then to San Francisco, where he began his career as a freelance writer and later a magazine editor.

His first novel, Elena, in 1973, was called "a wonderful book" by Vladimir Nabokov. Then came the joy of gay sex in 1977, a groundbreaking sex manual written with his psychotherapist Charles Silverstein. “I think if I wrote it alone, it would be called a tragedy of homosexuality,” White once joked. “(Silverstein) brings the warm, lovely part.”

Throughout most of White's career, he drew on his life and wrote novels about homosexuals and sexual freedom. It can be argued that his most famous work is the Boy’s own story in 1982, the first of the trilogy, where he began his life from childhood to middle age, followed by the Beautiful Room, Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997).

White lived in France between 1983 and 1990, where he became friends with people like Michel Foucault and became interested in French literature, continuing to write an admiring biography of Jean Genet – winning White’s Pulitzer Prize, along with Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud.

During his career, White has written more than 30 books. Some of his more famous novels include Married Men, which also attracted his life, Fanny: Novel, a historical novel about the author Frances Trollope and social reformer Frances Wright.

He also published five memoirs: My Life in 2005; City Boy, About His Life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, 2009; In Pearl: My Years in Paris in 2014; Unpunished Bads, About His Taste in Literature, 2018; and My Lifetime Love, Prolific Sex Life in His Life in 2025. White estimated that he slept with three people for 20 years a week. In New York in the 1970s, he wrote: "I think it's normal to write twice in the morning, wandering to the docks and having sex with 20 people on trucks. When I wrote, when I had sex with 3,000 men over the years, one of my contemporaries asked pity: 'Why less than?

White was diagnosed with HIV positive in 1984. “I wasn’t surprised, but I was frustrated,” he told The Guardian in January. “I kind of pulled the lid onto my head and thought, ‘Oh, oh, I’ll die in a year or two… It turns out I’m a slow progresser.”

White taught at Brown University and became a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.

White is survived by Michael Carroll, whose husband and partner for nearly 30 years.