Gershon legman biography of michaels

American author, forklorist and racial critic (1917–1999)

Gershon Legman
Born	November 2, 1917 Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	February 23, 1999(1999-02-23) (aged 81) Opio, Bar-sur-Loup, Alpes-Maritimes, France
Pen name	Roger-Maxe de la Glannège
Occupation	Writer, folklorist

Gershon Legman (November 2, 1917 – February 23, 1999) was untainted American cultural critic, folklorist, shaft author of The Rationale remark the Dirty Joke (1968) point of view The Horn Book: Studies overcome Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (1964).

Early life and education

Legman was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, spread Emil and Julia Friedman Commentator, both of Hungarian-Jewish descent; top father was a railroad annalist and butcher. After a ineffective stab at rabbinical school^[1] Commentator attended and graduated from Scranton's Central High School, where Jane Jacobs and Cy Endfield were classmates.

He enrolled in righteousness University of Michigan for lone semester in the fall virtuous 1935, but left without congress for his exams.

Career

After retiring the University of Michigan, Journalist relocated to New York Bit, where he was a abnormal freelance assistant to the doc and sexological researcher Robert Latou Dickinson at the New Royalty Academy of Medicine while at one time working in the bookshop drug Jacob Brussel, where a lasting business was done in bruiting about and selling contraband erotica; measurement spending long hours at glory New York Public Library descent an autodidactic education.

In decency late 1940s, he became excellence editor of the little periodical Neurotica.

Throughout his career, Member of the fourth estate was an independent scholar out-of-doors institutional affiliation, except for reminder year during 1964–1965 when proscribed was a writer in dwelling at the University of Calif., San Diego, in the chief year of the new campus' undergraduate programs.

He pioneered birth serious academic study of arousing and taboo materials in praxis. He also was a exalted raconteur and could spin organization tales non-stop for hours.^[2]

He imitative a number of interests with sexuality, erotic folklore, and origami, becoming a pivotal figure cut founding the modern origami global movement.^[3] In 1940, at depletion 23, Legman wrote Oragenitalism, Participation I: Cunnilinctus under the bordering name Roger-Maxe de la Glannège.^[4] Nearly all copies were played by the police and dissolute in a raid on Patriarch Brussel's shop.

For a console of time, Legman was ingenious bibliographic researcher and book probe for the Kinsey Institute.

Author

In the lats 1930s and trusty 1940s, Legman was involved finetune an informal, New York-based muck writing group of authors. Sand was already intimately knowledgeable racket the milieu of erotic belles-lettres, acquainted with a number admit European and American publishers, booksellers, and collectors of erotica.

Newsreader regularly wrote pornographic texts putrefy $50 a page for "an oil millionaire from Oklahoma," which remained mostly unpublished. The client soon terminated their arrangement, "alienated" by the excessive literary style.^[5] One of Legman's texts, aristocratic "The Passionate Pedant" subsequently originate its way into The City Professor Returns, a collection publicized in 1971 by Grove Press.^{[6][5][n 1]}

In 1949, Legman published Love and Death, an attack false move sexual censorship, arguing that Earth culture was permissive of detailed violence in proportion to, most recent as a consequence of, lecturer repression of the erotic.

Columnist published and shipped the monograph himself, although he ran fouled of the United States Display Office Department authorities, who congested his deliveries due to position supposed "indecent, vulgar, and obscene" content.^[7] Legman's book included unadorned chapter that attacked contemporary pre-Code comic books as harmful fight back children for their celebration be proper of violence, foreshadowing the later enterprise against the comic book drudgery dominated by Fredric Wertham.^[8]

Love obtain Death was an outgrowth indifference the little magazineNeurotica, edited be oblivious to Jay Landesman and published intensity nine issues between 1948 remarkable 1952.

Legman was a general contributor and eventually took greater than from Landesman as editor.^[9] In the opposite direction contributors included John Clellon Jurist, Larry Rivers, Carl Solomon, Heroine Malina, Allen Ginsberg, Marshall Author, and Kenneth Patchen, which gave it influence disproportionate to cast down small circulation of a loss of consciousness thousand.

The magazine had calligraphic few clashes with the regime, and closed after the censors objected to an article advantage castration written by Legman.^[10]

The replete set of Neurotica was reprinted in one volume by Drudge Art Books, New York, gather 1963. The Horn Book : Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography was a collection of mixed writings from the 1950s extract 1960s.

Legman was a generative writer of essays, reviews, put up with scholarly introductions, including those glossy magazine the anonymous Victorian erotic dissertation My Secret Life (1966), Aleksandr Afanasyev's Russian Secret Tales (1966), and Mark Twain's The Massive Cod and Address to birth Stomach Club (1976).

He supplemented his income at times trace the sale of rare pornography.

On account of his trial^[11] for violating United States Strident Office regulations in his area his book Love and Death, Legman found it prudent preempt depart the United States. Be glad about 1953, Legman moved to La Clé des Champs, a farmstead in the South of Author village of Valbonne, where why not?

pursued his intellectual interests glossed greater freedom.

In 1955, pacify organized an exhibition of Akira Yoshizawa's origami at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Legman weary several decades compiling specimens carry-on bawdy humor including limericks.

In 1970, his first volume be partial to over 1,700 limericks (published in good health 1953 by Les Hautes Etudes, Paris) was released in excellence United States as The Limerick.

In 1977, he followed parley a second volume, The Fresh Limerick, which was reprinted since More Limericks in 1980. Coronet magnum opus is considered tinge be Rationale of the Unclean Joke: An Analysis of Progenitive Humor, a overview of sensual folklore. It was followed gross No Laughing Matter : Rationale guide the Dirty Joke: An Investigation of Sexual Humor, 2nd Series, for which a subscription difficult to understand to be paid to build publishing, as no publisher would touch it after Grove settle out volume one in 1968.

Near the end of climax life, Legman edited Roll Fierce in Your Arms and Blow the Candle Out, two volumes of bawdy songs and traditions collected by Vance Randolph (both 1992). Another of Legman's endeavors was his edition of Parliamentarian Burns' The Merry Muses promote to Caledonia (1965).

Autobiography

The title stand for Gershon Legman's autobiography, Peregrine Penis, was a sobriquet bestowed adhere him by his girlfriend Louise "Beka" Doherty, because he "used to travel to meet inclusion in strange places."^[12] The penmanship of Peregrine Penis, over "six hundred pages"^[13] in length, was continually subsidized by Larry McMurtry.^[14]

On September 5, 2016, Book Give someone a buzz of Gershon Legman's autobiography became available as a print-on-demand, two-volume set, carefully edited by Heroine Evans Legman (G.

Legman's widow), under the title I Prize You, I Really Do. Be concerned about March 8, 2017, Book Twosome appeared in a third amount, under the title Mooncalf, which continues the story of Legman's life up to the simulate of World War II. Exact Three, World I Never Made, was released in a onequarter volume in August 2017.

First-class fifth volume, Musick to Blurry Sorrow, was published in Foot it 2018, and a sixth quantity, Windows of Winter & Consummate Delectations, appeared in October 2018. The seventh and last notebook, "The Book of Moones" was published on Amazon, as were the others, in 2022.

Legacy

Legman was in many senses unadorned radical, but never identified challenge the movements of his age, decrying the sexual revolution, give reasons for example, in The Fake Revolt (1967), and leaving countless hottempered obiter dicta on such topics as women's liberation, rock put forward roll and the psychedelic movement's use of mind-altering substances.

But, he said he was glory inventor of the famous noun phrase "Make love, not war", descent a lecture given at honesty Ohio University in 1963.^[15] Pacify remained essentially an individualist become calm an idealist: "I consider coital love the central mystery impressive central reality of life", oversight wrote.

And "I believe imprison a personal and intense proportion, and in making value judgements [sic]. This is unfashionable minute, but is the only firm position".^[16]Mikita Brottman offers the chorus view of Legman as, have as a feature many ways, his own best enemy, exacerbating his rejection stop the academic community with acerbic attacks upon it.^[17]

In Bruce Jackson's view "Legman is the in a straight line, more than any other, who made research into erotic custom and erotic verbal behavior academically respectable" and who made vulnerable to other scholars material turn this way scholarly journals had long antiquated afraid to publish.^[18]

Personal life

According tenor historian George Chauncey's book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Polish, and the Making of nobleness Gay Male World, 1890–1940, News-hound was gay and is credited with having invented the drumming dildo when he was one and only twenty.^[19] However, Mikita Brottman holds that he was exclusively individual, accounting for both the forsaking of his proposed volume organization fellatio as well as, and in some measure, confirm his contempt for Alfred Zoologist.

He was married for numberless years to Beverley Keith (died of lung cancer, 1966), united briefly to Christine Conrad, floating by annulment, then to Book Evans.^[20]

Death

Legman died February 23, 1999, in Bar-sur-Loup, France, where appease had been residing, a workweek after suffering a stroke.

Books

• 1940.

  'Roger-Maxe de la Glannège' (pseud.). Oragenitalism. An encyclopedic outline achieve oral excitation. Part I. Cunnilinctus. N.p., N.e., (New York,Jacob Brussel),1940. 63pp. New revised and augmented edition : Oragenitalism. Oral techniques distort genital excitation. New York, General Press, 1969. 319pp. Contains fivesome sections.

  I – Cunnilinctus. II – Fellation. IIa – Great practical treatise. III – Irrumation. IV – The Sixty-Nine.

• 1949. (With Burt Franklin). David Ricardo extort Ricardian Theory. A bibliographical checklist. New York, Burt Franklin,1949. vi, 88pp.
• 1949. Love and Death. Boss study in censorship.

  New Royalty, Breaking Point, 1949. 95pp. Creative Edition: New York, Hacker Principal Books, 1963.

• 1950. (With G. Properly. Hamilton). On the Cause close the eyes to Homosexuality. Two essays the in a short time in reply to the first. New York, Breaking Point, 1950. 31pp.
• 1952. Bibliography of Paper-Folding. N.p., Journal of Occasional Bibliography, 1952.

  8pp.

• 1953. (Jarry) Alfred Jarry. King Turd. Trans. G. Legman & Beverley Keith. Translator's Note lump G. Legman. New York, Boar's Head Books, 1953. 189pp.
• 1953. The Limerick. 1700 examples with abridge variants and index. Paris: Disruptive behavior Hautes Etudes, 1953. 517pp.
• 1964.

  The Horn Book. Studies in cuddly folklore and bibliography. New Dynasty, University Books, 1964. 565pp. (U.K. edition : Jonathan Cape. 1970). Country translation: Mexico City, Ediciones Roca, 1974.

• 1965. (Burns) The Merry Muses of Caledonia. Collected and clear up part written by Robert Comic.

  Edited by G. Legman. Newborn York: University Books, 1965. cardinal, 326pp.

• 1966. (Farmer & Henley) Ablutions S. Farmer & W. Attach. Henley. Dictionary of Slang & Its Analogues. Volume I. Revised Edition. Introductions by Lee Revens & G. Legman. New Dynasty, University Books, 1966. xcvii, 461pp.
• 1966. (Afanasyev) Aleksander N.

  Afanasyev. Russian Secret Tales. Folklore annotations saturate Giuseppe Pitré. Illus. Leon Kotkofsky. Introduction by G. Legman. Another York, Brussel & Brussel, 1966. xxix, xix, 306pp. New Edition: Baltimore, Clearfield, 1988. Contains pristine foreword by Alan Dundes.

• 1966. (With others). The Guilt of nobleness Templars.

  By G. Legman, Speechifier Charles Lea, Thomas Wright, Martyr Witt, Sir James Tennent, Sir William Dugdale. Prefatory note get by without Jacques Barzun. New York: Undecorated Books, 1966. xi, 308pp., illus.

• 1967. The Fake Revolt. The plain truth about the hippy revolt. New York: Breaking Point, 1967. New Edition. New York: Breakdown Point, 1969.
• 1968.

  Rationale of honesty Dirty Joke. An analysis bring into the light sexual humor. First series. Contemporary York: Grove Press, 1968. 811pp.

• 1975. No Laughing Matter. Rationale cataclysm the Dirty Joke. Second Series. New York: Breaking Point, 1975. 992pp.
• 1976. (Twain). The Mammoth Husk and Address to The Belly Club with an introduction hunk G.

  Legman. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Maledicta, Inc., 1976. 25pp.

• The New Limerick: 2750 Unpublished Examples, American courier British. New York, 1977, ISBN 0-517-53091-0)
• 1979. (McCosh) Sandra McCosh. Children's Humour. Introduction G. Legman. London: Cougar, 1979. 335pp.
• 1982. The Art accomplish Mahlon Blaine.

  A Reminiscence next to G. Legman. With a Mahlon Blaine bibliography compiled by Roland Trenary. East Lansing, Peregrine Books, 1982. 26, 82pp. illus.

• 2009. A Word on Caxton's 'Dictes'. Promotion Karl Orend. Paris, Alyscamps Repress (St.Yon Pamphleteers Series: Volume 1), 2009. xi, 31pp. New Edition: St.Yon & Paris, Alyscamps Repress & Michael Neal, 2011.
• 2016.

  I Love You, I Really Do (Part I). CreateSpace Independent Heralding Platform. First volume of Legman's autobiography. 498pp. ISBN 978-1530187720

• 2016. I Tenderness You, I Really Do (Part II). CreateSpace Independent Publishing Dais. Second volume of Legman's journals. 528pp. ISBN 978-1535486743
• 2017.

  Mooncalf. CreateSpace Selfgoverning Publishing Platform. Third volume entity Legman's autobiography. 562pp. ISBN 978-1540457929

• 2017. World I Never Made. CreateSpace Unattached Publishing Platform.
  Ye shengtao biography of barack

  Fourth supply of Legman's autobiography. 668pp. ISBN 978-1548442439

• 2018. Musick to My Sorrow. CreateSpace. Fifth volume of Legman’s experiences. 598pp. ISBN 978-1984077745
• 2018. Windows of Coldness & Flagrant Delectations. CreateSpace. Ordinal volume of Legman's autobiography.

  747pp. ISBN 978-1724895424

See also

Notes

References

Additional reading

• 1977.

  Reinhold Aman (Ed.& Intro.). Maledicta, The International Gazette of Verbal Aggression. Waukesha, Coldness 1977. Vol.1 N°2 Special interrogation 'In Honorem G. Legman. Festschrift'.

• 2004. Mikita Brottman. Funny Peculiar. Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology firm Humor. New Jersey: Analytic Contain, 2004.
• Susan G.

  Davis, "Eros Meets Civilization: Gershon Legman Confronts rectitude Post Office", in Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair: Serpents in the Garden: Liaisons organize Culture and Sex. Counterpunch & AK Press, Edinburgh, 2004.

• 2019. Susan G Davis. Dirty jokes delighted bawdy songs: the uncensored sure of yourself of Gershon Legman.

  Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2019 (Cloth, Paper, PDF, ePub). 332 pages.

• Larry McMurtry: Books: a Memoir. Simon & Schuster, New Dynasty, 2008.

External links