Description
Book SynopsisCollector of sexual folklore. Cataloger of erotica. Tireless social critic. Gershon Legman's singular, disreputable resume made him a counter-cultural touchstone during his forty-year exile in France. Despite his obscurity today, Legman's prescient work and passion for the prurient laid the groundwork for our contemporary study of the forbidden. Susan G. Davis follows the life and times of the figure driven to share what he found in civilization's secret libraries. Self-taught and fiercely unaffiliated, Legman collected the risqué on street corners and in theaters and dug it out of little-known archives. If the sexual humor he uncovered often used laughter to disguise hostility and fear, he still believed it indispensable to the human experience. Davis reveals Legman in all his prickly, provocative complexity as an outrageous nonconformist thundering at a wrong-headed world while reveling in conflict, violating laws and boundaries with equal abandon, and pursuing love and improbable ad
Trade Review"A more difficult subject is hard to imagine—a self-taught, little-known, irascible scholar who with little support and great opposition delved into some of the darkest corners of culture. Yet this remarkable and utterly engaging biography is the epic story of an unlikely hero as well as a lesson in just how much one person can accomplish in one lifetime. It also evokes an era, one uncomfortably like our own, in which scholars, theologians, politicians, and police wrestle with the unresolved issues of love and death."--John Szwed, author of
Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth "A vigorous. . . intellectual biography of [Legman's] peculiar, relentless career." --
Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One: The Stranger
Chapter Two: Sex Researcher
Chapter Three: Kinsey's Bibliographer
Chapter Four: Love & Death
Chapter 5: Neurotica
Chapter Six: Advanced Studies
Chapter Seven: "The Ballad" and The Horn Book
Chapter Eight: The Key to the Fields
Chapter Nine: The Hell Drawer
Chapter Ten: Under Mt. Cheiron
List of Works Consulted
Unpublished Works
Interviews
Archives of Papers and Letters
