Edward Prime Stevenson was born on January 29, 1858, in Madison, New Jersey. His father, Paul E. Stevenson, was a Presbyterian minister and a school principal; his mother, Cornelia, came from the Prime family of distinguished literary and academic figures. After studying law, Stevenson decided to become a writer and a journalist. In 1901 he moved to Europe, living in Florence and Lausanne, where he died of a heart attack in 1942. In 1896 Stevenson published The Square of Sevens, and the Parallelogram: An Authoritative Method of Cartomancy with a Prefatory Note by Robert Antrobus that was supposedly written in 1735. However, it is believed that he was the author. In 1906, under the pseudonym <a href="https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL2003010A/Xavier_Mayne">Xavier Mayne</a>, Stevenson published the homosexually themed novel Imre: A Memorandum, and in 1908 a sexology study, The Intersexes, a defense of homosexuality from a scientific, legal, historical, and personal perspective.