A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Edmund White is widely known for his essays and novels on gay and artistic life, as well as for his biographies of prominent writers. In 1993, he published Genet: A Biography, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. White’s brief Atlas biography Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel will be published October 9.

RIMBAUD WAS a childhood hero of mine, and it was interesting to revisit him for this short biography. I found him less heroic as a person and maybe even more interesting as a writer. I think I wrote more about him as a gay figure, about his love of Paul Verlaine, than previous writers had done. I don’t think I exaggerated its importance; as far as I know, they were