Writer's Reading Justin Spring on In Search of Samuel Steward: Rediscovering an OSU Professor Turned Sexual Revolutionary

Author Justin Spring discusses The Secret Historian, his hot-off-the-press biography of Samuel Steward, an alum of Ohio State’s English department in the 1930s.

Steward became a tattoo artist, a gay porn writer, a researcher with Alfred Kinsey on his landmark sex project, a friend of Gertrude Stein and other modernist writers, and the lover of Rudolph Valentino, Thornton Wilder, and Rock Hudson, to name just a few.

Spring is a writer and curator specializing in 20th-century American art and culture. His previous books include the biographies Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art (Yale University Press, 2000) and Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude (Universe, 2002). The Secret Historian has received rave reviews from the New York Times Book Review, Harper's, Boston Globe, and others, including this notice from Debby Applegate, author of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. "This is a rare and important book. Secret Historian is a genuinely captivating combination of clear writing, a clean conscience, and more dirty stories than I ever imagined one life could hold."

Cosponsored by Ohio State’s Department of English and the Sexuality Studies Program.