![]() "Samuel Steward, secret sexual historian, is a secret no longer. " Secret Historian is a startlingly, unforgettably vivid glimpse into a life-and a world-that few of us can imagine." - Terry Teachout, author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong Sammy Steward is all but unknown except by a handful of historians, but Justin Spring's lively biography-which is full of important new information about pre-Stonewall gay life-should put Sammy on the map, which is where he decidedly belongs." - Martin Duberman, author of Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey ![]() "A true page-turner-and a memorable act of historical reclamation. Instead, through Steward's copious records, we have a brave, fly-on-the-wall account of American homosexual subculture and persecution." - Martin Stannard, author of Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark: The Biography As the story of a sex-obsessed recovering alcoholic later addicted to barbiturates and to masochistic thrills, this could easily have become a portrait of a failure. A cultivated, rather shy professor of English literature, Sam Steward dropped out in midlife to become an eminent tattooist and writer of S&M porn. ![]() "Justin Spring documents the extraordinary life of one of Kinsey's crucial gay witnesses, and reading Secret Historian is like reading Kinsey dramatized. A vivid, candid portrait." - Kirkus Reviews Generous excerpts from Steward's journals and unpublished memoirs fortify an already comprehensive examination of a life lived with unabashed independence and homoerotic expression during the sexual rebellion of the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. 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." - Publishers Weekly "Life in the closet proves boisterous indeed in this biography of an iconic figure of the pre-Stonewall gay demimonde. tackled life with awe-inspiring abandon" - Details "This is a rich and exuberant biography of a man who deserves to be better known" - The Economist Spring has reconstituted Steward, as Phil Andros might say, in flesh and blood and all sorts of bodily fluids." - David D'Arcy, San Francisco Chronicle "Justin Spring's jaw-dropping Secret Historian reads like a novel probing a lifelong rebel's courage, creativity and ultimate sadness. 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." - Benjamin Moser, Harper's Steward was an obsessive record keeper, and his journals and his 'Stud File' of thousands of encounters allow to create a remarkably full portrait of a man whose life was what Edmund White's might have been had White been born three decades earlier. A talented writer who early attracted the attention of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, he found his career blocked by a determination (so different from hers and his) to write candidly about his homosexuality. "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. One suspects there are many more stories of that time worth telling, and too few treasure-packed attics." - Mark Harris, The New York Times Book Review The probity and expansive vision of Spring's work is a reminder that a great, outspread terrain of gay history remains to be mapped. As a biographer, he's humble but firm-he lets Steward's vivid, energetic prose do much of the talking but keeps his own hand on the tiller and never gets giddy, even when Steward seems to be carousing his way through the entire Modern Library. ![]() Be assured that it's all for real, and that Spring, even when neck-deep in sensational material, is not a sensationalist. Samuel Steward, the subject of this absorbing act of biographical excavation, had many identities, including several that the subtitle of the book omits. But even the most skeptical reader of his new book, Secret Historian, will have to admit that the bar is now set high. "Somewhere in the United States, there may be an attic containing the written remnants of a previously unchronicled 20th-century life that was even more astonishing than the one the writer Justin Spring discovered in San Francisco a few years ago. ![]()
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