Frank Harris Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Emigration
Frank Harris, born in Ireland around 1856, came of age in a world that would not confine his energies to one country or one calling. As a young man he left the British Isles for the United States, part of a 19th century movement of Irish emigrants seeking opportunity. He supported himself with hard and varied labor, working at times as a manual hand and even as a cowboy in the American West. The roughness and immediacy of those early experiences gave him a vein of material that he later mined in fiction, particularly in short stories that drew on frontier life, the rhythms of prairie towns, and the self-made characters he observed firsthand.

Turning to Letters and Journalism
After a period of study and self-education, Harris found a durable home in the English language press. He returned to Europe and pursued journalism with a fervor that would make his name. His combination of energy, pugnacity, and exacting standards quickly pushed him from contributor to editor. He wrote criticism that demanded seriousness from authors and readers alike, valuing style as a proof of character and ideas as a spur to action. He also developed a reputation for fearlessness, unafraid to enter debates about art, politics, or morality.

Editor in London
Harris rose to prominence in London as editor of influential reviews, notably the Fortnightly Review and the Saturday Review. In those roles he shaped taste as much as he reflected it, commissioning essays, criticism, and reportage, and turning his office into a meeting place for the capital s lively literary world. It was under his editorship that George Bernard Shaw wrote his famous drama criticism for the Saturday Review, a collaboration that highlighted Harris s knack for identifying distinctive voices and giving them a platform. He also published and encouraged writers such as H. G. Wells and Max Beerbohm, among others, and kept a close watch on theatrical innovation, continental currents, and the intersection of art with social change.

Association with Oscar Wilde
Among the figures most closely linked to Harris is Oscar Wilde. Harris admired Wilde s wit and recognized the originality of his plays and essays. During the trials that destroyed Wilde s career, Harris attempted to rally support, and later he set down his understanding of the man and the catastrophe in his study Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions. That book, often vivid and sometimes contentious, provided portraits not only of Wilde but of the circle around him, inevitably touching on personalities such as Lord Alfred Douglas. Harris s closeness to the events, his judgments, and his flair for narrative ensured that the volume remained one of the most talked about accounts of Wilde in the years after the scandal.

Fiction, Biography, and Critical Portraits
Harris s literary production went well beyond newspaper columns. He wrote short stories that transformed his American experiences into crafted narratives of ambition, desire, and fate. He also wrote The Man Shakespeare, a vigorous and controversial attempt to read the plays back into the life of their author, blending biography, criticism, and conjecture in a style that, for admirers, brought the dramatist to life and, for detractors, overreached. His novel The Bomb tackled the Haymarket affair in Chicago, exploring the passions and injustices surrounding labor conflict and political violence. In a long-running project titled Contemporary Portraits, he sketched the characters of leading artists, politicians, and thinkers of his time, drawing on personal encounters to create a gallery that included friends, collaborators, and adversaries. These essays revealed how he prized force of personality, moral courage, and the ability to write or act decisively in public life.

My Life and Loves and Battles over Censorship
Harris s most famous and notorious work was his multi-volume autobiography, My Life and Loves. Written in a frank, direct, and often erotic register, it mingled recollection with bold self-portraiture and sparked intense debate about truth, taste, and the limits of publication. The books were issued outside the usual British and American channels and were banned in several jurisdictions for obscenity, a fact that reinforced Harris s identity as a provocateur and a defender of freedom to speak plainly about sex and human motives. Admirers praised the series for its candor and sheer vitality; critics attacked it for excess, for self-mythologizing, and for straining the line between memory and invention. The polemics around the autobiography placed Harris in the middle of broader early 20th century arguments about censorship, morality, and the rights of authors and readers.

American Interludes and Public Engagement
Harris spent significant periods in the United States as well as Britain, writing for and editing mass-circulation magazines in New York and contributing to the current of ideas around politics, labor, and the arts. He lectured, debated, and remained a presence in salons and editorial rooms. His path crossed repeatedly with notable figures of the day. In addition to Shaw, Wells, and Beerbohm, his circles overlapped with playwrights, novelists, and actors who moved between London and New York, as well as publishers prepared to take risks on difficult material. He thrived in this environment, where personality could be as decisive as policy, and where a sharp editor could shape national conversations.

Style, Reputation, and Relationships
Harris s style as a writer and editor was combative and expansive. He admired courage in others and often sought to test it in print, setting high stakes in his judgments of theater and literature. Those qualities forged bonds with fellow iconoclasts while alienating others. George Bernard Shaw, for example, benefited from Harris s editorial trust and, in turn, offered a model of the forthright, idea-driven prose Harris admired. With H. G. Wells, Harris shared a belief that literature should engage with social and scientific change. His association with Oscar Wilde remained a defining thread: he championed Wilde s talent, mourned his downfall, and helped to frame Wilde s posthumous reputation for a new generation of readers. The arguments his books provoked, and the legal and moral pressures they attracted, reinforced his public image as a man who invited controversy because he believed controversy was the price of saying what one thought.

Final Years and Legacy
In his later years Harris lived largely on the Continent, spending time in France and continuing to write and revise. He died around 1931, closing a life that had run from provincial Ireland through the American West and the metropolitan pressrooms of London and New York. His legacy lies partly in the careers he helped shape as an editor and partly in the force of his own books. The Bomb remains a rare fictional lens on an American political trauma by an author who lived on both sides of the Atlantic. The Man Shakespeare stands as a testament to the audacity of biography and the persistent desire to make Shakespeare humanly legible. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions summarizes an age s fascination with genius and scandal. And My Life and Loves, with all its provocations, holds a central place in the history of censorship and sexual frankness in English prose.

Assessment
Frank Harris s life illustrates how an individual, born in modest circumstances in Ireland, could reinvent himself repeatedly through talent, effort, and nerve. He moved fluidly among roles as editor, critic, novelist, biographer, and provocateur. The people around him were among the most consequential literary figures of his generation, and his engagements with Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Max Beerbohm capture a dynamic cultural network that spanned theaters, newspapers, and bookshelves. If his self-presentation sometimes strained credulity, his commitment to the power of language never wavered. His influence endures in the institutions he led, the writers he fostered, and the continuing debates he helped to spark about art, truth, and the freedom to speak.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Frank, under the main topics: Meaning of Life - Writing - Free Will & Fate - Sarcastic - Resilience.

Other people realated to Frank: Robert Baldwin Ross (Celebrity), Lord Alfred Douglas (Poet)