AUTHOR

ALAN HART (1890-1962), assigned female at birth, was born in Hall’s Summit, Kansas, the only child of Albert and Edna Hart. After his father died when Hart was two, Hart and his mother moved to Albany, Oregon, where his mother remarried. As a child, Hart dressed and regarded himself as a boy. He attended Albany College (now Lewis & Clark), transferred to Stanford, then returned to Albany and graduated in 1912. He graduated from the University of Oregon Medical School (now Oregon Health & Science University) in 1917 with the highest honors. In medical school, Hart wore the required skirts for women but masculinized his appearance by wearing men’s coats and collars. After graduating, he persuaded a doctor to perform a full hysterectomy on him, making Hart the first trans person in the United States to receive gender-affirmative surgery. Afterward, Hart cut his hair short, wore only men’s clothing, and changed his name to Alan L. Hart. While living in Washington state during the Depression, Hart published four socially-conscious novels (Doctor Mallory, The Undaunted, In The Lives of Men, and Dr. Finlay Sees It Through), all medical dramas set in the Pacific Northwest. In 1948, he and his wife, Edna Ruddick, moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where Hart earned a master’s degree in public health from Yale. Hart dedicated the rest of his professional life to tuberculosis research and was one of the first doctors to document how tuberculosis was transmitted and how it could be slowed by detection. Hart and his wife lived together in Connecticut until Hart’s death from heart failure in 1962.

PRAISE

“Hart’s novel asks essential questions still relevant to trans experiences today in America: How does one live fully as oneself in a hostile environment? What toll does fear, secrecy, and shame take on a person’s life? What does it mean to be regarded as an outsider, to experience America from a liminal space?” —Carter Sickels, from the foreword to The Undaunted