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Shop nowSecret Historian
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Learn moreDrawn 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 the material for an exceptionally compassionate and brilliantly illuminating life-and-times biography. More than merely the story of one remarkable man, Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life long before Stonewall and gay liberation.
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; Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art; and Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude.
Sean Runnette, a multiple AudioFile Earphones Award winner, has produced several Audie Award–winning audiobooks and has also narrated works by John Steinbeck and Richard P. Feynman. Of his performance of The Courage to be Free, AudioFile Magazine wrote "Runnette’s tender approach to every sentence and paragraph helps the author’s wisdom glow. Along with the understated power of the author’s writing, Runnette’s performance makes this one of the most arresting and thought-provoking audiobooks available today". He is a member of the American Repertory Theater company and has toured internationally with Mabou Mines, an avant-garde theater company. Sean's television and film appearances include Two If by Sea, Copland, Sex and the City, Law & Order, Third Watch.
Reviews
“Samuel Steward, secret sexual historian, is a secret no longer…A major achievement.”
“Astonishing…The probity and expansive vision of Spring’s work is a reminder that a great, outspread terrain of gay history remains to be mapped.”
“This is a rich and exuberant biography of a man who deserves to be better known.”
“Justin Spring’s jaw-dropping Secret Historian reads like a novel probing a lifelong rebel’s courage, creativity, and ultimate sadness…Spring has reconstituted Steward, as Phil Andros might say, in flesh and blood and all sorts of bodily fluids.”
“Life in the closet proves boisterous indeed in this biography of an iconic figure of the pre-Stonewall gay demimonde…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.”
“Can a secret sex diary furnish an artistic legacy as meaningful as Emily Dickinson’s sewn-up bundles of poems, or the piles of paintings Theo van Gogh inherited after his brother’s premature demise? Samuel Steward may never have imagined it, but his erotic history raises the question…[This] extensive documentation—and the miraculous rescue of that documentation, recounted in the book’s preface—left his biographer material to reconstruct an emblematic homosexual life.”
“A fascinating biography…[Steward] tackled life with awe-inspiring abandon.”
“Justin Spring documents the extraordinary life of one of Kinsey’s crucial gay witnesses, and reading Secret Historian is like reading Kinsey dramatized…A brave, fly-on-the-wall account of American homosexual subculture and persecution.”
“A true page-turner—and a memorable act of historical reclamation. Sammy Steward is all but unknown except by a handful of historians, but Justin Spring’s lively biography…should put Sammy on the map, which is where he decidedly belongs.”
“Secret Historian is a startlingly, unforgettably vivid glimpse into a life—and a world—that few of us can imagine.”
“This is a rare and important book. Secret Historian is a genuinely captivating combination of clear writing, a clean conscience, and more dirty stories than I ever imagined one life could hold.”
“[A] provocative biography…Generous excerpts from Steward’s journals and unpublished memoirs fortify an already comprehensive examination of a life lived with unabashed independence and homoerotic expression during the sexual rebellion of the pre-Stonewall era…A vivid, candid portrait.”
“This sophisticated biography will appeal to both general and academic readers with an interest in LGBT issues.”
“Sympathetic and entertaining.”
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