In an interview given to Contemporary Authors, Steward commented: "I consider erotica to be the purest form of entertainment, making the most direct connection between reader and writer and material."

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Beginning with $tud, published in 1966, the Andros books are a series of graphic and witty accounts in the first person of a fictional hustler. As Steward explained, he made the narrator of his stories a male hustler because of a prostitute's "easy entry into any level of society." "He can go see a judge as easily as he could see a surfer," Steward noted.

While most of the Andros books were originally published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they were revised a decade later to considerable critical and commercial success.

Other Andros titles include The Joy Spot (1969); My Brother, the Hustler (1970, revised as My Brother, My Self, 1983); Renegade Hustler (1970, revised as Shuttlecock, 1984); When in Rome, Do ... (1971, revised as Roman Conquests, 1983); San Francisco Hustler (1971, revised as The Boys in Blue, 1984); The Greek Way (1971, revised as Greek Ways, 1984); Below the Belt and Other Stories (1981); and Different Strokes (1984).

In an introduction to the 1990 abridged edition of $tud published by Alyson Press, John Preston, the author of such gay erotic landmarks as Mr. Benson and I Once Had a Master and Other Tales of Erotic Love, wrote that Andros's works are "true-to-life travelogues of gay life in America during the Fifties and early Sixties. While some other writers of 'porn' were content with one-dimensional characters and nuts-and-bolts sex, Phil Andros was a pilgrim reporting on the multi-faceted mysteries and fantasies of a sensual experience that contradicted the mass-market concepts of the unhappy, guilt-ridden, tragicomic homosexual."

Under his given name, Steward also published such books as Pan and the Firebird (1930), a collection of short stories; the memoir, Chapters from an Autobiography (1981); a historical novel, Parisian Lives (1984); Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo with Gangs, Sailors, and Street-Corner Punks, 1950-1965 (1990); Understanding the Male Hustler (1991); and A Pair of Roses (1993).

Throughout his career, Steward also contributed several hundred stories to European magazines under various pseudonyms, including Donald Bishop, Thomas Cave, Ted Kramer, John McAndrews, Joe Reynolds, Ward Stames, and Philip Young.

Steward died on December 31, 1993, at age 84, of chronic pulmonary disease in Berkeley, California.

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