Gershon Legman (November 2, 1917 – February 23, 1999) was an American cultural critic, folklorist, and author of The Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1968) and The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (1964).

[5] One of Legman's texts, titled "The Passionate Pedant" subsequently found its way into The Oxford Professor Returns, a collection published in 1971 by Grove Press.

[6][5][n 1] In 1949, Legman published Love and Death, an attack on sexual censorship, arguing that American culture was permissive of graphic violence in proportion to, and as a consequence of, its repression of the erotic.

Legman published and shipped the treatise himself, although he ran afoul of the United States Post Office Department authorities, who stopped his deliveries due to the supposed "indecent, vulgar, and obscene" content.

[9] Other contributors included John Clellon Holmes, Larry Rivers, Carl Solomon, Judith Malina, Allen Ginsberg, Marshall McLuhan, and Kenneth Patchen, which gave it influence disproportionate to its small circulation of a few thousand.

In 1953, Legman moved to La Clé des Champs, a farm in the South of France village of Valbonne, where he pursued his intellectual interests with greater freedom.

Near the end of his life, Legman edited Roll Me in Your Arms and Blow the Candle Out, two volumes of bawdy songs and lore collected by Vance Randolph (both 1992).

The title of Gershon Legman's autobiography, Peregrine Penis, was a sobriquet bestowed on him by his girlfriend Louise "Beka" Doherty, because he "used to travel to meet her in strange places.

On March 8, 2017, Book Two appeared in a third volume, under the title Mooncalf, which continues the story of Legman's life up to the eve of World War II.

[16] Mikita Brottman offers the consensus view of Legman as, in many ways, his own worst enemy, exacerbating his rejection by the academic community with vitriolic attacks upon it.

[19] However, Mikita Brottman holds that he was exclusively heterosexual, accounting for both the abandonment of his proposed volume on fellatio as well as, possibly and in some measure, for his contempt for Alfred Kinsey.