How long does it take to read Secret Historian?
The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade
Justin Spring, Sean Runnette
Secret Historian by Justin Spring, Sean Runnette takes about 8 hours 56 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 56 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2010. 487 pages, about 133,925 words.
18 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 14 hours 53 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 56 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 35 minutes |
The page count is the median across 8 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Drawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward maintained a secret sex life from childhood on, and documented these experiences in brilliantly vivid (and often very funny) detail. After leaving the world of academe to become Phil Sparrow, a tattoo artist on Chicago's notorious South State Street, Steward worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on his landmark sex research. During the early 1960s, Steward changed his name and identity once again, this time to write exceptionally literate, upbeat pro-homosexual pornography under the name of Phil Andros. Until today he has been known only as Phil Sparrow―but an extraordinary archive of his papers, lost since his death in 1993, has provided Justin Spring with the material for an exceptionally compassionate and brilliantly illuminating life-and-times biography. More than merely the story of one remarkable man, Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life long before Stonewall and gay liberation.
Subjects: Authors, american, Authors, biography, Poets, biography, Gays, biography, College teachers, Illinois, biography
