Steward met sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in late 1949 and subsequently became an unofficial collaborator with Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research. He later detailed these encounters, some of them sexual, in his brief memoir Chapters from an Autobiography (1981). In 1936 Steward was summarily dismissed from his second teaching position, at the State College of Washington at Pullman, as the result of his sympathetic portrayal of a prostitute in his well-reviewed comic novel Angels on the Bough, though he taught at other universities afterward.ĭuring a 1937 trip to visit Gertrude Stein in France, he also met with many other literary figures, including Thornton Wilder, Lord Alfred Douglas (the lover of Oscar Wilde), Thomas Mann, and André Gide. With richly detailed introductions to the essays that situate them in the context of Steward's fascinating life, Philip Sparrow Tells All will bring this unusual and engaging writer to a fresh readership beyond the dental chair.Samuel Steward (1909-1993), also known as Phil Andros, Phil Sparrow, and many other pseudonyms, was an American writer, university professor, tattoo artist, and unofficial collaborator with Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research. Many decades later, Steward's writing feels as stylistically fresh and charming as it did in his time. Throughout, Mulderig's entertaining annotations identify Steward's often obscure allusions and tie the essays to the people and events of the day. We go along with him to a bodybuilding competition and a pet cemetery, and together we wander the boulevards of Paris and the alleys of Algiers. We hear of his stint as a holiday sales clerk at Marshall Field's (where he met and seduced Rock Hudson), his roles as an opera and ballet extra in hilariously shoddy costumes, his hoarding tendencies, his disappointment with the drabness of men's fashions, and his dread of turning forty. In these essays we spend time with Steward's friends like Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, and Thornton Wilder (who was also Steward's occasional lover). For Philip Sparrow Tells All, Jeremy Mulderig has gathered thirty of Steward's most playful and insightful columns, which together paint a vivid portrait of 1940s America. Yet from 1944 to 1949, writing under the name Philip Sparrow, Steward produced monthly columns for the journal that were full of wit and flourish and that constituted a kind of disguised autobiography, with their reflections on his friendships and experiences and their endless allusions to his trove of multifarious knowledge. Given this biography, he sounds like a most unlikely contributor to a trade magazine like the Illinois Dental Journal. Samuel Steward (1909-93) was an English professor, a tattoo artist for the Hells Angels, a sexual adventurer who shared his considerable range of experiences with Alfred Kinsey, and a prolific writer of everything from scholarly articles to gay erotica (under the penname Phil Andros). On the dream, the illusion (December 1948).On keepsakes, gew-gaws, and baubles (September 1948). On fabulous, fabulous field's (January 1948).On men and their feathers (January 1947).On operas and operating (December 1946).On the importance of dying young (April 1946).On soldiers and civilians (February 1945).On fifteen years of lent (January 1945).
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