Publisher's Synopsis
The representative figures of this New York were Susan Sontag, Jasper Johns, George Balanchine, among others - fierce cultural arbiters, 'martyr's to art' - living in a city that was still obsessed with the hierarchy of the arts and the idea of the Pure. From Isherwood to Mapplethorpe, Borges to Foucault, Brodkey to Burroughs, Edmund White knew them all, and writes about them in City Boywith love, affection, insight and often biting wit. It is a fascinating, personal journey through the vibrant and explosive New York of the 70s - featuring wonderful sideshows in San Francisco and a Venice presided over by the radiant Peggy Guggenheim - which proceeds joyfully from literary infighting at the New Yorkerto erotic entanglements downtown to the post-Stonewall burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers.