Edmund White, acclaimed queer novelist and Pulitzer Prize finalist, has died.

American queer novelist , essayist, and biographer Edmund White died at the age of 85 at his home in New York of "natural causes," local media reported Wednesday after speaking with his agent, Bill Clegg. White (Cincinnati, 1940), widely hailed as a pioneer , established himself as an icon thanks to his chronicles of gay life inspired by his own experiences in more than 30 books.

In 1977, together with writer Charles Silverstein, he wrote one of his most recognized works, The Joy of Gay Sex , a kind of gay Kama Sutra combined with chapters in which he reflected on the situation of homosexual men at the time, on racism and so on.

In addition to his queer stories, the writer was known for his role as a biographer . He debuted with Genet: A Biography (1993), in which he delved into the life of French poet and novelist Jean Genet , and for which he was a finalist for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize .

A few years later, in 1998, he did the same with the French novelist and critic Marcel Proust and in the most recent, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (2008), he reconstructed the life of the poet Arthur Rimbaud.

"As a miserable gay teenager, suffocated by boredom and sexual frustration, and paralyzed by self-loathing, I longed to run away to New York and make it as a writer; I identified completely with Rimbaud's desires to be free, to be published, to be sensual, to go to Paris . The only thing I lacked was his fearlessness," White wrote at the beginning of that biographical novel.

He was diagnosed with HIV in 1985 and suffered several strokes and a heart attack. Fear of the disease is a theme he explored in his semi-autobiographical trilogy (A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1997), which chronicled the life of a young gay man in the 20th century .