Frank Harris

Frank Harris (1856–1931) was an Irish-born editor, writer and adventurer. He ran away to America at fifteen, worked as a bootblack, cowboy and lawyer, studied in Germany and settled in London, where in the 1880s and 1890s he edited the Evening News, the Fortnightly Review and the Saturday Review, publishing Shaw, Wells and Max Beerbohm, and became the friend and later the biographer of Oscar Wilde. His stories, his Contemporary Portraits and his life of Shakespeare were admired; My Life and Loves, the sexually explicit autobiography he printed privately in the 1920s, was banned everywhere. Harris was vain, generous and untruthful, and nobody who met him forgot him.