The Crimson Letter

A study of the gay experience at Harvard University in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its effect on culture in the United States.

“Sophisticated scandal and spicy anecdote.” —The New York Observer

In The Crimson Letter, bestselling historian Douglass Shand-Tucci follows the gay experience at America’s oldest university during the years of its greatest influence, focusing upon students, faculty, alumni, and hanger-on who struggled to find their place within the confines of Harvard Yard and in the society outside. Combining the learned and the lurid, tragedy and farce, scandal and vindication, and figures of world renown as well as those whose influence extended little further than Harvard Square, The Crimson Letter is an engrossing account of a university transforming and transformed by those passing through its gates, and of their enduring impact on American culture.