About Alex Comfort
Alexander Comfort (10 February 1920 – 26 March 2000) was a British scientist and physician, writer and activist, known best for his nonfiction sex manual, The Joy of Sex (1972). He was a poet and author of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as a gerontologist, geriatrician, sexologist, political theorist and commentator, anarchist, and pacifist. == Early life and education == Comfort was born in Palmers Green, North London, and raised in Barnet, Hertfordshire, then a London suburb. His parents were Alexander Charles Comfort, an administrator in education at the London County Council, and Daisy Elizabeth (Fenner) Comfort, a former teacher, who taught her son French and some Latin by the time he began school. He was educated at Highgate School in London. While he was a student there he tried to develop an improved compound of gunpowder. During his experiments he inadvertently blew up his left hand, of which only the thumb remained. Later he claimed that his left hand proved "very useful for performing uterine inversions". Comfort had a passion for molluscs, developed on family holidays in Hartland, on the Devon coast, and he joined the Conchological Society of Great Britain & Ireland when he was eighteen years old. He made many contributions to the literature.
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