18 Facts About Gershon Legman

Gershon Legman was an American cultural critic, folklorist, and author of The Rationale of the Dirty Joke and The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography.

Gershon Legman enrolled in the University of Michigan for one semester in the fall of 1935, but left without sitting for his exams.

Gershon Legman pioneered the serious academic study of erotic and taboo materials in folklore.

Gershon Legman was a talented raconteur and could spin out tales non-stop for hours.

In 1940, at age 23, Gershon Legman wrote Oragenitalism, Part I: Cunnilinctus under the pen name Roger-Maxe de la Glannege.

Gershon Legman was already intimately knowledgeable of the milieu of erotic literature, acquainted with a number of European and American publishers, booksellers, and collectors of erotica.

Gershon Legman regularly wrote pornographic texts at $50 a page for "an oil millionaire from Oklahoma," which remained mostly unpublished.

One of Gershon Legman's texts, titled "The Passionate Pedant" subsequently found its way into The Oxford Professor Returns, a collection published in 1971 by Grove Press.

Gershon Legman published and shipped the treatise himself, although he ran afoul of the United States Post Office Department authorities, who stopped his deliveries due to the supposed "indecent, vulgar, and obscene" content.

Gershon Legman's book included a chapter that attacked contemporary pre-Code comic books as harmful to children for their celebration of violence, foreshadowing the later crusade against the comic book industry dominated by Fredric Wertham.

Gershon Legman was a regular contributor and eventually took over from Landesman as editor.

Gershon Legman was a prolific writer of essays, reviews, and scholarly introductions, including those for the anonymous Victorian erotic memoir My Secret Life, Aleksandr Afanasyev's Russian Secret Tales, and Mark Twain's The Mammoth Cod and Address to the Stomach Club.

Gershon Legman supplemented his income at times through the sale of rare erotica.

In 1953, Gershon Legman moved to La Cle des Champs, a farm in the South of France village of Valbonne, where he pursued his intellectual interests with greater freedom.

Gershon Legman spent several decades compiling specimens of bawdy humor including limericks.

In Bruce Jackson's view "Gershon Legman is the person, more than any other, who made research into erotic folklore and erotic verbal behavior academically respectable" and who made accessible to other scholars material that scholarly journals had long been afraid to publish.

Gershon Legman was married for many years to Beverley Keith, married briefly to Christine Conrad, ended by annulment, then to Judith Evans.

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