A Boy's Own Story (1982), signed

• Published: E. P. Dutton, New York, 1982
• Edition: First edition, first printing
• Binding: Boards backed in cloth, dust jacket
• Pages: 217 pp.
• Dimensions: Octavo
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0-525-24128-0
• Signature: Signed by White on the half-title.
• Condition: Very good in a very good dust jacket.

The first of Edmund White's autobiographical novels, published in 1982: a nameless narrator's adolescence in the Midwest of the 1950s, among divorced parents, boarding schools, psychiatrists and the first, furtive encounters with other boys. Its title borrows from the Victorian adventure magazine The Boy's Own Paper, and its sensuous, exact prose recalls Nabokov, who named White among his favourite American writers.

It took gay fiction into the mainstream bookshop and onto the reading lists of readers who were not gay, and it began the cycle that continued with The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony. White, a member of the Violet Quill and co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex, became the most visible gay writer of his generation. He died in June 2025.