Steward sent an urgent telegram to Gipson asking him to stop selling the book on campus: “A young poor man with only one job asks that you withdraw his novel … because his departmental head and dean hint at his discharge.”Ĭaxton had advertised the book as “not appeal to the less liberal mind.” This “alarmed several people,” according to Steward. Yet, as Steward noted in an interview during the 1970s, the book was “very tame – reading like ‘Little Women’ by today’s standards.” The publication of ‘Angels on the Bough’ prompted Washington State College to not renew Steward’s contract. After an editorial review, Caxton Printers agreed to publish Steward’s novel, “Angels on the Bough,” which told the story of a small group of characters and their intertwined lives in a college town. He worked to find a publisher and contacted a small firm in rural Idaho. The following year, Washington State College – now Washington State University – hired Steward to teach classes on a one-year contract.Īn aspiring writer, Steward drafted his first novel while still a graduate student. in English in 1934 from Ohio State University. A book met with backlashĪ native of the Midwest, Steward earned his Ph.D. More than 80 years ago, an English professor named Samuel Steward was dismissed from his teaching position after publishing what his college’s president deemed a “racy” novel.Īs an archivist and scholar studying publishing in the American West, I’ve located published and unpublished archival sources detailing the controversy surrounding Steward after he published his first novel, which ultimately cost him his job. 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. 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. 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 Justin Spring with the material for an exceptionally compassionate and brilliantly illuminating life-and-times biography. 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. 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.Īfter 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. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Steward, "Secret Historian "is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. Print Secret Historian Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegadeĭrawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M.
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