Mary Zaborskis has reviewed Shared Secrets: The Queer World of Newbery Medalist Charles J. Finger by Elizabeth Findley Shores in the May 2022 issue of the Journal of Southern History.
Elizabeth Findley Shores’s recent publication conveys 1925 Newbery Medalist Charles J. Finger’s biography, which resembles a picaresque novel in ways that illuminate how his queer identity necessitated creative, risky, and complicated strategies for survival, sociality, and flourishing. Coming of age in London at a time of men’s clubs, blackmailed politicians, and the Oscar Wilde trials, Finger was captivated by the world of male sociality and intimacy available to him, which especially converged at the site of literature—discussing, reviewing, and critiquing it with other men.
Through illuminating the queer intimacies and pressures that undergirded Finger’s complicated legacy in children’s literature, Shores importantly elucidates in public the queer presences that Finger himself could only encode aslant or suppress in his lifetime.
—Mary Zaborskis, Journal of Southern History
For nearly a century, British expatriate Charles Joseph Finger (1867–1941) was best known as an award-winning author of children’s literature. In Shared Secrets, Elizabeth Findley Shores relates Finger’s untold story, exploring the secrets that connected the author to an international community of twentieth-century queer literati.
As a young man, Finger reveled in the easy homosociality of his London polytechnical school, where he launched a student literary society in the mold of the city’s private men’s clubs. Throughout his life, as he wandered from England to Patagonia to the United States, he tried to recreate similarly open spaces—such as Gayeta, his would-be art colony in Arkansas. But it was through his idiosyncratic magazine All’s Well that he constructed his most successful social network, writing articles filled with coded signals and winking asides for an inner circle of understanding readers.
Capitalizing on the publishing opportunities of the day, Finger used every means available to express his twin loves—literature and men. He produced an enormous body of work, and his short, semiautobiographical fiction won some critical acclaim. Ultimately, the children’s book that won Finger a Newbery Medal ushered him into the public eye, ending his development as an author of serious queer literature.
Shared Secrets is both the story of Finger’s remarkable, adventurous life and a rare look at a community of gay writers and artists who helped shaped twentieth-century American culture, even as they artfully concealed their own identities.
Elizabeth Findley Shores, an independent scholar living in Little Rock, Arkansas, is the author of On Harper’s Trail: Roland McMillan Harper, Pioneering Botanist of the Southern Coastal Plain and Earline’s Pink Party: The Social Rituals and Domestic Relics of a Southern Woman.
The Journal of Southern History is published four times a year, in February, May, August, and November, by the Southern Historical Association, which has its editorial offices at the Department of History, Rice University and its administrative offices at the University of Georgia. For eighty-five years, the Journal has published the best of southern history.