Books like Secret Historian by Justin Spring

Justin Spring’s biography uncovers the secret life of Samuel M. Steward, a twentieth‑century novelist, poet, and university professor, through unpublished diaries, journals, and sexual records. Steward, who maintained a hidden sex life from childhood, was an intimate friend of literary figures such as Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder. After leaving academia, he became the tattoo artist Phil Sparrow known on Chicago’s South State Street and later partnered with Alfred Kinsey in his landmark sex research. Under the pseudonym Phil Andros he produced literate, pro‑homosexual pornography in the early 1960s. Spring’s work, based on Steward’s extensive but long‑lost papers, offers a compassionate and illuminating portrait of one remarkable man and, more broadly, of homosexual life before Stonewall and the gay liberation movement.

First publish date: 2010