Justin Spring

Justin Spring is an American art historian and author. His 2010 biography of Samuel Steward was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Books

Secret Historian The book, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade tells the story of Samuel Steward, who lived as an openly gay man from 1909 to 1993.

Spring acquired a trove of Steward's personal files after his death from the executor of his estate. This surfeit of records included over 80 boxes containing Steward's personal journals, writings about his sexuality, correspondence with other artists, a draft of a memoir, drafts for semi-autobiographical fictional material, pictures, drawings, and the Stud File. The Stud File was a file drawer containing 746 individual index cards containing documentation and intimate details of all 746 men Steward had sexual relations with. The Stud File included famous figures such as Rock Hudson, Rudolph Valentino, Lord Alfred Douglas, and Thornton Wilder. In the New York Times, historian Martin Duberman, referring to the trove of Steward's records and Spring's biography, stated that many gay people lived closeted, secretive lives throughout the 20th century, and to find such primary source material is extraordinary.

In an interview with Lambda Literary, Spring stated that he approached ten different publishers and they all rejected the manuscript for Secret Historian, being wary of the homosexuality and the sexualized source material. Spring was eventually able to publish his biography with Farrar, Straus and Giroux after researching the source material for 10 years.

Artists Spring has also written biographies of the artists Fairfield Porter and Paul Cadmus. A reviewer described the Porter biography as "a fully rounded portrait of an important American painter who is still too often overlooked simply for his choice of subject."