Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.61 (768 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0374533024 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 512 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-06-01 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"What Secret Historan means to me" according to David. Truth is indeed stranger (and a helluva lot more fun) than fiction! Had the life of this incredible man not been so thoroughly researched (a decade in the making) by the author, Justin Spring, and so meticulously documented by the subject himself, one would scarcely believe such a life could have existed.Secret Historian, The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, intrigued and touched me on so many levels. Firstly, it's a real page-turner. I didn't want to put it down. Rescued from oblivion Jim Coughenour I knew I was going to enjoy this biography from its first page. Spring writes, "I first came across Steward's name in the gay pulp fiction archive and database at the John Hay Special Collections Library at Brown University" The gay pulp fiction archive?! Immediately readers know they're in for a ride.Samuel Steward (aka Donald Bishop, Thomas Cave, John McAndrews, Phil Sparrow, Ward Stames, Phil Andros) was a poet, novelist, Catholic English professor, tattoo arti. Three Stars Amazon Customer Well written but I would have enjoyed reading Mr Steward's diaries more.
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 Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art and Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude.
(His swerve from academia into tattooing, with its mix of physical pain and proximity to nubile male flesh, was essentially a fetish turned into a business.) Spring's sympathetic and entertaining story of a life registers the limitations imposed on homosexuals by a repressive society, but also celebrates the creativity and daring with which Steward tested them. Spring (Paul Cadmus) fleshes out this colorful story by quoting copiously from his subject's highly literate journals and sex diaries—his Stud File contained entries on trysts with
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 Sparrowbut 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. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. More than merely the story of one remarkable man, Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life long before Stonewall and gay liberation.Secret Historian is a 2010 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.. 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. Drawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B