Classic Biography Frank Harris (Penguin Classic Biography)

Notorious writer and legendary sexual adventurer, Frank Harris scandalized Victorian and Edwardian England with his outrageous carnal exploits. He lived a sensational life surrounded by myth and exaggeration - much of which was perpetrated by himself. As a journalist Frank Harris was the chronicler of the glittering "fin de siecle" coterie which included Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, George Bernard Shaw and Aleister Crowley. But it was for his frenzied sexual escapades that he became famed - as recorded explicitly in his racy and unreliable autobiography "My Life and Loves", which was banned for its pornographic contents. Posterity has classed him as a lustful satyr and liar ever since. Yet Philippa Pullar shows that beneath the image of the bawdy Lothario lay a far more complex personality. Frank Harris was also a social reformer, traveller, literary critic and loyal friend, a man with a private, melancholy side, whose constant affairs were partly to seek the reassurance that he had never had from his cold, puritanical father. Compulsive and often outrageous, this brilliantly entertaining and deeply researched work is the fullest portrait possible of an extraordinary man.