Description
Collector 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 risque 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 adventures. Through it all, he maintained a kaleidoscopic network of friends, fellow intellectuals, celebrity admirers, and like-minded obsessives.
About the Author
Susan G. Davis is professor emerita of Communication and Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia and Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience.
Reviews
"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 Supplement
Book Information
ISBN 9780252084447
Author Susan Davis
Format Paperback
Page Count 332
Imprint University of Illinois Press
Publisher University of Illinois Press
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 156mm * 23mm
About the Author
Susan G. Davis is professor emerita of Communication and Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia and Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience.
Reviews
"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 Supplement
Book Information
ISBN 9780252084447
Author Susan Davis
Format Paperback
Page Count 332
Imprint University of Illinois Press
Publisher University of Illinois Press
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 156mm * 23mm
