author
Edward Prime-Stevenson
1858–1942
A restless American man of letters who wrote fiction, criticism, and some of the earliest serious English-language books about same-sex love. Living much of his later life in Europe, he used both his own name and the pseudonym Xavier Mayne to explore subjects that were risky to address openly in his time.
4 Audiobooks
Imre: A Memorandum
by Edward Prime-Stevenson
The Square of Sevens: An Authoritative Method of Cartomancy with a Prefatory Note
by Edward Prime-Stevenson
White Cockades: An Incident of the "Forty-Five"
by Edward Prime-Stevenson
Left to Themselves: Being the Ordeal of Philip and Gerald
by Edward Prime-Stevenson
About the author
Born in Madison, New Jersey, in 1858, Edward Prime-Stevenson became a novelist, journalist, and music critic with wide-ranging interests. He is also known as Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson, and some of his best-known work appeared under the pen name Xavier Mayne.
He is now especially remembered for Imre: A Memorandum (1906), a novel about love between two men, and The Intersexes, a nonfiction study that argued for understanding homosexuality rather than condemning it. Those books have made him an important figure in LGBTQ literary history, especially because he was writing on these themes so early and so directly.
Beyond that work, he wrote fiction, essays, and music criticism, and spent much of his later life in Europe. His career feels strikingly modern: curious, independent, and willing to follow difficult subjects wherever they led.