My Life and Loves

Frank Harris

Foreword by the Publisher

For many, My Life and Loves by Frank Harris will summon up memories of the mid-sixties, when it first appeared after years of being banned. This classic of sexual adventure was originally published in 1922, yet it could only be legally purchased in Britain after Penguin won its famous battle over the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960.

My Life and Loves is Volume One of the autobiography of one of the most talented magazine editors of his day. Arrogant and vain, yet well-read, a great talker and very generous, Frank Harris, in the words of his close friend, George Bernard Shaw, “blazed through London like a comet, leaving a trail of deeply annoyed persons behind him, and like a meteor through America”.

After spending many years as an editor in both England and America, Harris went out of his way to write the most honest autobiography ever. Few have written more freely or completely about the most intimate affairs of their lives, and few had both the opportunity and the drive for such an immensely varied sex life. Coupled with his great talent for portraiture, My Life and Loves is an inspired and inadvertently humorous, social, political and literary history of an age in transition.

Hopefully, as in the sixties, its reappearance will precede another period of greater sexual awareness, and the end of attempts by some to turn society back to a morality based on discredited Victorian values.

Published by the Colporteur Press, 1994
228 pages, paperback, ISBN 1 873639 03 1, £9.95