Gershon Legman

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

Legman was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Emil and Julia Friedman Legman, both of Hungarian-Jewish descent; his father was a railroad clerk and butcher. After a failed stab at rabbinical school Legman attended and graduated from Scranton's Central High School, where Jane Jacobs and Cy Endfield were classmates. He enrolled in the University of Michigan for one semester in the fall of 1935, but left without sitting for his exams.

After departing the University of Michigan, Legman relocated to New York City, where he was a part-time freelance assistant to the physician and sexological researcher Robert Latou Dickinson at the New York Academy of Medicine while simultaneously working in the bookshop of Jacob Brussel, where a brisk business was done in publishing and selling contraband erotica; while spending long hours at the New York Public Library acquiring an autodidactic education. In the late 1940s, he became the editor of the little magazine Neurotica.

Throughout his career, Legman was an independent scholar without institutional affiliation, except for one year during 1964–1965 when he was a writer in residence at the University of California, San Diego, in the first year of the new campus' undergraduate programs. He pioneered the serious academic study of erotic and taboo materials in folklore. He also was a talented raconteur and could spin out tales non-stop for hours.

He acquired a number of interests including sexuality, erotic folklore, and origami, becoming a pivotal figure in founding the modern origami international movement. In 1940, at age 23, Legman wrote Oragenitalism, Part I: Cunnilinctus under the pen name Roger-Maxe de la Glannège. Nearly all copies were seized by the police and destroyed in a raid on Jacob Brussel's shop. For a period of time, Legman was a bibliographic researcher and book scout for the Kinsey Institute.

In the lats 1930s and early 1940s, Legman was involved with an informal, New York-based pornography writing group of authors. He was already intimately knowledgeable of the milieu of erotic literature, acquainted with a number of European and American publishers, booksellers, and collectors of erotica. Legman regularly wrote pornographic texts at $50 a page for "an oil millionaire from Oklahoma," which remained mostly unpublished. The customer soon terminated their arrangement, "alienated" by the excessive literary style. One of Legman's texts, titled "The Passionate Pedant" subsequently found its way into The Oxford Professor Returns, a collection published in 1971 by Grove Press.

In 1949, Legman published Love and Death, an attack on sexual censorship, arguing that American culture was permissive of graphic violence in proportion to, and as a consequence of, its repression of the erotic. 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. 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.

Love and Death was an outgrowth of the little magazine Neurotica, edited by Jay Landesman and published in nine issues between 1948 and 1952. Legman was a regular contributor and eventually took over from Landesman as editor. Other contributors included John Clellon Holmes, Larry Rivers, Carl Solomon, Judith Malina, Allen Ginsberg, Marshall McLuhan, and Kenneth Patchen, which gave it influence disproportionate to its small circulation of a few thousand. The magazine had a few clashes with the authorities, and closed after the censors objected to an article on castration written by Legman.