By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Andrew Sean Greer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, remembers the first time he read Edmund White. It was the summer of 1989, he was beginning his second year at Brown University and he had just come out.

Having learned that White would be teaching at Brown, he found a copy of White’s celebrated coming-of-age novel, “A Boy’s Own Story.”

“I’d never read anything like it — nobody had — and what strikes me looking back is the lack of shame or self-hatred or misery that imbued so many other gay male works of fiction of that time,” says Greer, whose “Less” won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2018. “I, of course, did not know then I was reading a truly important literary work. All I knew is I wanted to read more.

“Reading was all we had in t

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