Samuel Steward, though, was his given name, and regardless of what you call him, he remains a little-known figure in Chicago's cultural history. To close friends Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein and Christopher Isherwood, he was 'Sammy.' Later, when his life as an obscure literary figure gave way to a steady career as a successful writer of gay pulp fiction, Steward became Phil Andros. Chips of the tattoo world.'Īnd there were other names. Privately, Steward called himself 'the Mr.
To his students at DePaul and Loyola universities, where he was popular and taught for decades (and where his other life as a tattoo artist went largely undetected), he was professor Steward, a mesmerizing English teacher and sometimes writer whose primary work of literary fiction, 1936's 'Angels on the Bough,' had been compared to Henry James in a New York Times book review.
That's how he was known to the Hell's Angels who befriended him in Oakland, Calif., where he later moved. On South State Street, where he moonlighted as a tattoo artist during the middle years of the 20th century, surrounded by the violent and the sketchy, he was known as Phil Sparrow.
