Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson | |
---|---|
Born | Madison, New Jersey | January 29, 1858
Died | July 23, 1942 (aged 84) Lausanne, Switzerland |
Pen name | Xavier Mayne |
Occupation | Novelist, journalist |
Nationality | American |
Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson (January 29, 1858 – July 23, 1942) was an American writer. He used the pseudonym Xavier Mayne. [1]
Prime-Stevenson (also known as Edward Stevenson, Edward Prime Stevenson, and E. Irenaeus Prime Stevenson) was born in 1858 in Madison, New Jersey, [1] the youngest of five children born to Paul E. Stevenson and Cornelia Prime. His father was a Presbyterian minister and a school principal; his mother came from a distinguished literary and academic figures. [1]
After studying law, Stevenson decided to become a writer and a journalist. [1] During the 1880s, he began a career as a critic in New York City for Harper's Weekly, a political magazine, and as book reviewer and music critic for the weekly Independent. In 1896, Stevenson published The Square of Sevens, and the Parallelogram: An Authoritative Method of Cartomancy with a Prefatory Note by Robert Antrobus that was supposedly written in 1735. However, it is believed that Prime-Stevenson was the author. In 1906, under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne, Stevenson published the homosexually themed novel Imre: A Memorandum, and in 1908 a sexology study, The Intersexes, [1] a defense of homosexuality from a scientific, legal, historical, and personal perspective.
In 1901, he moved to Europe, living in Florence and Lausanne. He died in Lausanne of a heart attack in 1942, aged 84.[ citation needed]
"Between a protozoan and the most perfect development of the mammalia, we trace a succession of dependent intersteps...A trilobite is at one end of Nature's workshop: a Spinoza, a Shakespeare, a Beethoven is at the other... gone on insisting that each specimen of sex in humanity must... follow out two programmes only, or else be thought amiss, imperfect, and degenerate [?] Why have we set up masculinity and femininity as processes that have not perfectly logical and respectable inter-steps?".
— Xavier Mayne, History of Similisexualism [2]