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.

“For those who may recognize Charles J. Finger only as a name from a list of early Newbery Medal winners, this scrupulously researched biography by Elizabeth Findley Shores will be a revelation. Shared Secrets places the peripatetic author of Tales from Silver Lands—who described himself as ‘one of the odd type, blood brother to other literary wanderers’—in the company of Jack London and other writers whose lives (and parallel lives) loomed as large as their works. Shores illuminates the complexities and coding of the late-Victorian and early twentieth-century queer world, presenting her subject as fully, triumphantly human.”
—William B. Jones, author of Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History

“An engaging, well-written, and important biography of a figure largely neglected in literary studies, despite his stature, influence, and enormous collection of works.”
—Michael P. Bibler, author of Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968

“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. … 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, May 2022