Drawn from the secret journals and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century, before Stonewall and gay liberation. The Washington Post - Andrew Holleran …engrossing…Secret Historian is worth reading not for its subject's slight acquaintance with a few famous people, nor for his writing…but for the solitary splendor, the demented focus, the "closed-off narcissism" of his sexual quest.