My Life and Loves

"Had he not been a thundering liar, Frank Harris would have been a great autobiographer."Time Magazine, 1960"My Life and Loves" is the autobiography of the Ireland-born, naturalized-American writer and editor Frank Harris (1856-1931). The work gives a graphic account of Harris's sexual adventures and relates gossip about the sexual activities of celebrities of his day. Well-known and infamous for its straightforward graphical, enthusiastically pornographic description of sexual encounters, "My Life and Loves" resembles crazy, weird boys' adventure story, going from a boarding school setting to the Wild West. The work was banned in both the United States and Britain for a span of 40 years. In the early 1950s, Frank Harris's widow Nellie sold about a hundred pages of her husband's writings on further autobiographical matters to 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. This material became the fifth and final volume of "My Life and Loves".