Samuel Steward: January Portrait of the Month

Samuel M. Steward, Berkeley, CA, 1988/89

On the occasion of the recent publication of Philip Sparrow Tells All: Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist, we are pleased to feature Samuel Steward (1909–1993) as the January portrait of the month. Philip Sparrow Tells All (2015) is a collection of Steward’s essays from 1944 to 1949, published in the Illinois Dental Journal under one of the author’s pseudonyms.

Photographed by Robert Giard in the late 1980s, Steward was a writer and English professor, who later became an influential tattoo artist. He was born in Woodsfield, OH, and earned a BA, MA, and finally a PhD in English in 1932 at Ohio State University. Steward taught at several colleges and universities throughout his early career. His 1936 comic novel Angels on the Bough received critical recognition but also prompted the State College of Washington at Pullman to dismiss him from his teaching position because of the book’s sympathetic portrayal of a prostitute. Steward then moved to Chicago and became an associate professor of English at Loyola University from 1936 to 1946. From 1946 to 1948, he was an editor of the World Book Encyclopedia, and subsequently taught at DePaul University from 1948 to 1954.

Steward was introduced to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in 1937, and his friendship with them inspired him to write the memoir, Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (1977), and two mysteries that portrayed Stein and Toklas as detectives, Murder Is Murder Is Murder (1985) and The Caravaggio Shawl (1989). He also wrote Chapters from an Autobiography (1981), a brief memoir that recounted his encounters with other literary figures, including Thornton Wilder, Lord Alfred Douglas, and Thomas Mann. His historical novel Parisian Lives was published in 1984.

In 1949, Steward met the eminent sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and became an unofficial collaborator in Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research, including introducing Kinsey to many sexually active male subjects and donating sexually themed materials to his archive. After leaving academia in the mid-1950s, Steward made his living as a tattoo artist until 1970. Steward moved in the 1960s to the San Francisco Bay Area, and under the pen name Phil Andros, he wrote gay erotica, beginning with Stud in 1966. Steward died in 1993 on New Year’s Eve.