Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade

Spring, Justin

ISBN 10: 0374533024 / ISBN 13: 9780374533021

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9780374533021

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374533024
• ISBN 13: 9780374533021
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

2010 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction

Drawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century.

An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward maintained a secret sex life from childhood on, and documented these experiences in brilliantly vivid (and often very funny) detail.

After leaving the world of academe to become Phil Sparrow, a tattoo artist on Chicago's notorious South State Street, Steward worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on his landmark sex research. During the early 1960s, Steward changed his name and identity once again, this time to write exceptionally literate, upbeat pro-homosexual pornography under the name of Phil Andros.

Until today he has been known only as Phil Sparrow―but an extraordinary archive of his papers, lost since his death in 1993, has provided Justin Spring with the material for an exceptionally compassionate and brilliantly illuminating life-and-times biography. More than merely the story of one remarkable man, Justin Spring's Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life long before Stonewall and gay liberation.

About the Author

Justin Spring is a writer specializing in twentieth-century American art and culture, and the author of many monographs, catalogs, museum publications, and books, including Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade and Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art and Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude.