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Originally published 1922 | 3.4/5 Goodreads | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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My Life and Loves is the autobiography of the Ireland-born, naturalized-American writer and editor Frank Harris (1856–1931). As published privately by Harris between 1922 and 1927, and by Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press in 1931, the work consisted of four volumes, illustrated with many drawings and photographs of nude women. The book gives a graphic account of Harris' sexual adventures and relates gossip about the sexual activities of celebrities of his day.
Contents
The work was banned in both the United States and Britain for a span of 40 years. At one time it was sold in Paris for more than $100. By today's standards, however, the sexual behavior it portrays is rather unexceptional, consisting primarily in the patronizing of prostitutes or quasi-prostitutes.
Contemporary and historic figures discussed frequently in the book include Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Lord Folkestone, William Ewart Gladstone, Heinrich Heine, George Meredith, Charles Stewart Parnell, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Salisbury, Byron Caldwell Smith, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and many others.
Foreword
The foreword begins, "Here in the blazing heat of an American August, amid the hurry and scurry of New York, I sit down to write my final declaration of Faith, as a preface or foreword to the Story of my Life."
Chapters
Additional volume
In the early 1950s, Harris' widow Nellie sold about a hundred pages of his writings on further autobiographical matters to Kahane's son Maurice Girodias for a million French francs. Girodias gave the task of producing something publishable from them to Alexander Trocchi, and described the result as having only 20% of its content derived from the nominal source material. It was published by Girodias's Olympia Press in 1954 as My Life and Loves: Fifth Volume.
Grove Press omnibus edition
John F. Gallagher edited, and provided annotations for, a new omnibus edition, My Life and Loves: Five Volumes in One/Complete and Unexpurgated, published by Grove Press in 1963. This edition contained no illustrations. Gallagher described the Trocchi version as "apparently not authentic". James Campbell, comparing the two editions' fifth volumes, does however argue that Girodias's 20% figure was too low.