Samuel steward and thornton wilder archive#
Samuel steward and thornton wilder full#

BOMB’s founders-New York City artists and writers-decided to publish dialogues that reflected the way practitioners spoke about their work among themselves. Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring is out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.īOMB Magazine has been publishing conversations between artists of all disciplines since 1981. This secret history, written intimately from below, is an exemplar of biography’s power to comprehend societal forces through individual lives.

Steward-a poet, novelist, and university professor who left higher education to become a sex-researcher, skid-row tattoo artist, and pornographer-may seem at first an odd candidate for a biography, for he is practically unknown and nearly all his writing is out of print.” But through Steward’s queer, willful story, Spring has uncovered a major current in the felt experience of gay life in the 20th century.

Spring smartly frames the problem of his biography in his opening sentence: “Samuel M. I don’t think I have ever read a memoir where the archive’s presence was so palpable it’s almost a living character in the book. This obsession left a treasure trove of diaries, photographs, and a complete “Stud File” that fed Spring’s biography. Steward was an obsessive recorder of his erotic exploits, which lead to his role as a major informant for Kinsey’s pioneering studies of human sexuality.

Samuel steward and thornton wilder archive#

Spring was able to compose a comprehensive biography of this complex, elusive figure thanks to the enormous archive that Steward left upon his death, which preserved extensive documentation of his prodigious intellectual and sexual life. Toklas, Thornton Wilder, Alfred Kinsey, and George Platt Lynes. Steward, a novelist and professor whose confidants included Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Little did I know that Phil Andros the pornographer was also Phil Sparrow the tattooist, who was also Samuel M.

Samuel steward and thornton wilder full#

I always wondered, Who is this guy? Thankfully, Justin Spring has finally uncovered the full story in Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. Despite their erudition, his novels are always thoroughly hot and fun. You have to love a pornographer whose range of obsessions runs from rough trade to Keats and then always right back to rough trade. John Phillip Santos's The Farthest Home Is in an Empire of Fire: A Tejano Elegyby Callie Enlowįor years, I’ve treasured the intelligent, ribald, masculine novels of Phil Andros: Roman Conquests Greek Ways and My Brother, My Self. Wacky Packages New New Newby Nick Stillman Justin Spring's Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegadeby Jason Baumanįrederic Tuten's Self Portraits: Fictionsby Thomas Bolt Josiah McElheny's The Light Club and A Prismby Sabine Russ The Books's The Way Outby Peter MoysaenkoĮndless Boogie's Full House Headby Clinton Krute

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