Edward M. Burns died on Nov. 3, according to a family obituary published in the New York Times. He was the editor of Picasso: The Complete Writings, Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen,  A Passion for Joyce: The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Adaline Glasheen, and, most recenlty, Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner. He served as an editor of Text and its successor journal Textual Cultures and was Professor Emeritus at William Paterson University of New Jersey. He lived in the East Village, Manhattan.

Burns taught English at the Charles Evans Hughes High School of the Humanities (now called the Bayard Rustin High School of the Humanities), from the time it was founded, in 1983 till perhaps the late 1980s. He told Amy Feinstein, in an email: "I taught in a Junior HS in Canarsie and then in a High School in Manhattan.  It was while teaching in HS that I went at night to the Graduate Center of CUNY to earn a doctorate. . . . I had published two books, GS on Picasso and Staying on Alone while teaching in HS.  The Stein-Van Vechten letters were my doctoral dissertation."