Angels on the Bough.
Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1936.
8vo, 317 pp. Publisher's gray cloth lettered in gilt, unclipped dust-jacket priced $2.50. "Review copy" label dated with rubber stamp May 15, 1936 affixed to front pastedown. A very good copy, backstrip ends lightly rubbed, ink price on front free endpaper, top edge a little dusty. Dust-jacket good: quite soiled and split along spine panel and repaired with tape, slightly edgeworn but with little loss.
§ First edition, review copy, the scarce and historically significant first novel by Samuel M. Steward, who would later achieve fame as the gay erotica author "Phil Andros" and as a pioneering tattoo artist. Preceded only by his self-published collection of stories, Pan and the Fire-Bird.
Angels on the Bough chronicles the lives of a small circle of characters in an Ohio college town during the Great Depression, drawing upon Steward's own family experiences in the Midwest. The novel's sympathetic and frank portrayal of a prostitute—groundbreaking for its time—precipitated one of the most notorious academic freedom cases of the 1930s. When review copies reached the Washington State College where Steward taught English in May 1936, rumors of the book's "distasteful content" spread rapidly. Despite Steward's desperate telegram to publisher James H. Gipson requesting the book not be sold on campus, he was dismissed from his professorship. The case garnered national attention, with positive book reviews appearing in the New York Times and elsewhere even as Steward fought for his academic position. After months of investigation, the Association of American University Professors vindicated Steward, declaring his dismissal unjust. One AAUP member wryly noted the irony when Steward secured a new position at Loyola University: "Apparently our Catholic brethren are much more tolerant than a state institution in Washington."
Steward spent time as part of Gertrude Stein's literary circle in Paris during the 1930s, and as a research associate to Dr. Alfred Kinsey. In the 1960s he became a celebrated tattoo artist working under the name "Phil Sparrow". It was during this later period that Steward embraced his identity as "Phil Andros," producing works of gay male erotica that were among the first to portray homosexual relationships with literary merit and without pathologizing their subjects.
This censured first novel marked an important moment in LGBTQ literary history and established as a theme the sympathetic treatment of sexual outsiders that would define Steward's career. Item #126988
Price: $2,250.00