Age, Biography and Wiki

Gershon Legman was born on 2 November, 1917 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S., is an American author, forklorist and cultural critic. Discover Gershon Legman's Biography, Age, Height, Physical Stats, Dating/Affairs, Family and career updates. Learn How rich is he in this year and how he spends money? Also learn how he earned most of networth at the age of 81 years old?

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Occupation Writer, folklorist
Age 81 years old
Zodiac Sign Scorpio
Born 2 November, 1917
Birthday 2 November
Birthplace Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Date of death 23 February, 1999
Died Place Opio, Bar-sur-Loup, Alpes-Maritimes, France
Nationality United States

We recommend you to check the complete list of Famous People born on 2 November. He is a member of famous author with the age 81 years old group.

Gershon Legman Height, Weight & Measurements

At 81 years old, Gershon Legman height not available right now. We will update Gershon Legman's Height, weight, Body Measurements, Eye Color, Hair Color, Shoe & Dress size soon as possible.

Physical Status
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Dating & Relationship status

He is currently single. He is not dating anyone. We don't have much information about He's past relationship and any previous engaged. According to our Database, He has no children.

Family
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Gershon Legman Net Worth

His net worth has been growing significantly in 2023-2024. So, how much is Gershon Legman worth at the age of 81 years old? Gershon Legman’s income source is mostly from being a successful author. He is from United States. We have estimated Gershon Legman's net worth, money, salary, income, and assets.

Net Worth in 2024 $1 Million - $5 Million
Salary in 2024 Under Review
Net Worth in 2023 Pending
Salary in 2023 Under Review
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Source of Income author

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Timeline

1917

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.

1935

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.

1940

In the late 1940s, he became the editor of the little magazine Neurotica.

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.

1948

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.

1949

In 1949, he 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.

The book also 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.

1950

The Horn Book : Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography was a collection of assorted writings from the 1950s and 1960s.

1953

In 1953, Legman left his native United States for a farm, La Clé des Champs, in the village of Valbonne in the South of France, where he was able to pursue his intellectual interests with greater freedom.

1955

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

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

1963

The full set of Neurotica was reprinted in one volume by Hacker Art Books, New York, in 1963.

1964

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.

1965

Other achievements include his edition of Robert Burns' The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1965).

The title of Gershon Legman's autobiography, Peregrine Penis, was a sobriquet bestowed on him by his girlfriend Louise "Beka" Doherty, on account of the fact that he "used to travel to meet her in strange places."

The writing of Peregrine Penis, over "six hundred pages" in length, was continually subsidized by Larry McMurtry.

1966

Legman was a prolific writer of essays, reviews, and scholarly introductions, including those for the anonymous Victorian erotic memoir My Secret Life (1966), Aleksandr Afanasyev's Russian Secret Tales (1966), and Mark Twain's The Mammoth Cod and Address to the Stomach Club (1976).

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

On account of his trial for violating United States Post Office regulations in his distributing his book Love and Death, Legman found it prudent to depart the United States.

1968

His magnum opus was Rationale of the Dirty Joke?: (An Analysis of Sexual Humor), a tour de force of erotic folklore, succeeded by No Laughing Matter : Rationale of the Dirty Joke?: An Analysis of Sexual Humor, 2nd Series, for which a subscription had to be paid to support publishing, as no publisher would touch it after Grove did volume one in 1968.

1970

In 1970, his first volume of over 1,700 limericks (published in 1953 by Les Hautes Etudes, Paris) was released in the United States as The Limerick.

1977

He followed this with a second volume, The New Limerick in 1977, which was reprinted as More Limericks in 1980.

1992

Near the end of his life, Legman edited Roll Me in Your Arms and Blow the Candle Out, two volumes of bawdy songs and lore collected by Vance Randolph (both 1992).

2016

On September 5, 2016, Book One of Gershon Legman's autobiography became available as a print-on-demand, two-volume set, carefully edited by Judith Evans Legman (G. Legman's widow), under the title I Love You, I Really Do.

2017

On March 8, 2017, Book Two appeared in a third volume, under the title Mooncalf, which continues the story of Legman's life up to the eve of World War II.

Book Three, World I Never Made, was released in a fourth volume in August 2017.

2018

A fifth volume, Musick to My Sorrow, was published in March 2018, and a sixth volume, Windows of Winter & Flagrant Delectations, appeared in October 2018.

The seventh and last volume, "The Book of Moones" was published on Amazon, as were the others, in 2022.