Edmund White spent his boarding school nights crouched in a toilet stall reading Rimbaud, the French poet who gained notoriety for his drunken violence and love of older men. Fast-forward some odd years and White's again thinking about Rimbaud, but under decidedly different circumstances.

No longer the teen clinging to dreams of the big city and loving men, White's made quite a name for himself on the literary scene, a name that led Atlas publishing company to ask the author to pen Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel.

White recently invited our editor into his home to talk about the book, but, as happens, the conversation veered in all sorts of directions - from Rimbaud's drunken days to White's evolving take on gay marriage; from Rimbaud as the "teen top terror" to how France changed White's writing style. It's a potpourri!

Take a peek, after the jump…

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