In these reflections, colleagues, friends and admirers recall his risk-taking, his generosity and his insatiable taste for gossip.

Edmund White, a pioneering author who chronicled gay life and thumbed his own sexual experiences for literature that was at times arrestingly candid, died Tuesday. He was 85. White's agent, Bill Clegg,

Edmund White, a pioneer of queer literature who broke ground with his semiautobiographical novels chronicling gay life and the gay revolution, died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85. His agent,