COVER TO COVER

FRANK HARRIS: THE MAN WHO REFUSED TO BE BELIEVED

THEODORA VANE

December 2, 2025

Frank Harris lived like a man allergic to the ordinary—a fugitive from fact, a lover of scandal, and a journalist-novelist-editor who turned his own life into the most unreliable autobiography ever written. This is the story of the man no one ever fully believed, and whom everyone kept reading.

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Frank Harris loved three things above all else: sex, himself, and the printed word, usually in that order, never in moderation, and often in triumphant combination. History, forced into complicity, has accepted this hierarchy with the resigned indulgence one reserves for a scandalous uncle who talks too loudly at funerals. Everything about Harris lends itself to exaggeration. The facts blur, the anecdotes swell, the self expands like a biography written in a fun-house mirror. But beneath the boastful erotic athleticism and literary bravado lay a peculiarly modern figure—a man inventing himself boldly, recklessly, joyously, long before self-mythmaking became a cultural pastime. A man who, even when telling the truth, sounded like someone improving it.

He was born in Galway on February 14, 1856—an appropriate date for a man whose later life would be an unending love affair with himself. No date in Harris’s life stands untouched by doubt or story, which feels right. One should not expect the calendar to assert itself over a man who behaved as if time were a suggestion. His childhood—half documented, half performed—was unsettled, itinerant, and full of friction. He clashed with teachers, resented authority, and observed society with the cold curiosity of someone already practicing condescension. Even as a schoolboy he seems to have understood that ordinary life was a sentence to be appealed, that respectability was a trap for people who lacked imagination.

At fourteen he fled Ireland, or so he later recalled. The decision might have been made suddenly or slowly, heroically or petulantly—he wrote it differently depending on the decade. But the result was the same: He crossed the Atlantic in 1869 and stepped into New York like an unproven legend in need of a publisher. America electrified him. Here was a country where one’s past did not matter and one’s future was optional, a blank page on which arrogance looked like ambition. He worked as a porter, a bootblack, a bellhop, a laborer. The young Harris appears in his own telling like a Dickensian orphan who refuses to remain decorative. Every humiliation, in retrospect, was preparation.

Later he said he built the Brooklyn Bridge, tamed the frontier, and rode as a cowboy of mythic vigor, and who are we to argue? His memory was a printing press with no fact-checking department. What matters is not whether he built the bridge but that he wrote about it with conviction, which for Harris was indistinguishable from truth. He carried pistols and notebooks, love letters and grievances, and always the impression of someone who knew he was interesting long before anyone else thought to verify it.

A law degree, earned in Kansas in his late teens, appeared to stabilize him. But legal argument bored him; he preferred sentences that ended with admiration rather than verdicts. And so he sailed again, this time not to escape but to ascend. He arrived in England in 1882 and immediately behaved as though London had been waiting for him. Journalism became his weapon—quick, sharp, remunerative. He entered newsrooms like a man entering combat. By 1883 he was editing the Evening News; by the mid-1890s he controlled the Saturday Review; and for a time London’s literary world revolved around him in slight irritation, like a planet acknowledging a sudden moon.

George Bernard Shaw, the friend who admired Harris hugely, provided none of the facts were checked

He commissioned George Bernard Shaw—not just as a writer, but almost as a character in the novel of his own life. He sparred with H. G. Wells, approving of him, then resenting him, then admiring him again, the way a narcissist loves mirrors until they reflect a rival. He befriended Oscar Wilde, first as a contemporary intellect, then later as a posthumous trophy in the museum of Harris’s self-constructed greatness. One imagines dinners shimmering with cigars and ego, Harris leaning back, issuing pronouncements, telling stories so confidently no one dared request evidence.

Harris on Wilde: two volumes of admiration, invention, and the occasional drive-by character assassination

His offices became salons. His reviews became feuds. His editorials read less like journalism and more like staged monologues performed at close range. If some writers shape the world with delicacy, Harris shook it by the collar. He wrote as though language existed to sustain his appetite.

But journalism, however glamorous, is still a medium measured in inches. Harris needed pages. He needed binding. He needed posterity. And so, after years of editing others, he turned to his own writing. In 1908 he published The Bomb, a novel of anarchism and desire that reads like politics rewritten as seduction. Then came his Shakespeare sequence—The Man Shakespeare (1909), Shakespeare and His Love (1910), and The Women of Shakespeare (1911)—books that revealed, astonishingly or inevitably, a Harris who believed he understood Shakespeare more intimately than most understand themselves. He did not analyze Shakespeare so much as annotate him with admiration and envy. It is tempting to imagine Harris identifying with Falstaff, except that Falstaff was happy to be laughed at, and Harris never was.

Frank Harris attempts the Haymarket affair—with all the accuracy of a man who never let events get in the way of a good scene

His biographies of Wilde and Shaw were less scholarship than flirtation with genius—a desire to be remembered beside the men he described. He had a talent for proximity, for placing himself close to greatness until history casually included him in the group portrait.

World War I carried him back to the United States. From 1916 to 1923 he edited Pearson’s Magazine, a periodical that under his direction sounded perpetually like a lecture delivered standing up. He raged about morality, politics, censorship, justice. He demanded reform. He adored strength. He attacked hypocrisy with such pleasure that one suspects he believed hypocrisy was a competitor rather than a sin. Yet amid this earnestness glimmered his true obsession—himself. He was a reformer who celebrated rebellion mostly because rebellion is glamorous when narrated well.

The autobiography that scandalized a century and still feels like it should come with a legal disclaimer

And then came the performance for which all previous performances were rehearsals: My Life and Loves. The first volume appeared in 1922, the last one in 1927. Four books, hundreds of pages, and thousands of kisses (if one trusts the author’s arithmetic). It is a work of audacity: erotic, boastful, disarming, implausible, exuberant. It reads like Casanova rewritten by a man more interested in narrative than negotiation. One does not believe a word of it while believing every sentence.

The book was banned and therefore devoured. Passed hand to hand, hidden, smuggled, purchased in whispers. College boys read it under blankets. Married men stored it behind Sunday psalms. Women read it out of curiosity, out of irritation, or out of the desire to see whether Harris’s ego inflated in print matched anything in reality. Harris wrote sex like a duelist—thrusting, parrying, triumphant—but what he really loved was not the act, but the applause.

Still, buried beneath the fictionalized virility is something striking: candor. Harris refused euphemism. He refused shame. He wrote about desire and pleasure as if they were a literary right. His scandals, though lubricated by exaggeration, opened a door into modern frankness. Where Victorian sexuality hid behind lace, Harris tore down the curtains. Even if his conquests were inventions, they nevertheless reveal the man: He needed to be magnificent not only in bed, but in the paragraph describing the conquest.

He aged, as even myths must. The 1920s ended, and new writers replaced old provocateurs. Scandal fatigued. Harris, suddenly aware that fame has a faster metabolism than pride, dramatized his own decline. He claimed adversity, curated misfortune, styled himself a martyr of prudish society. He grew older, angrier, but never quieter. Even his bitterness was theatrical.

Nice, where Frank Harris staged his final exit—proof that even scoundrels choose good scenery for a last act

He died in Nice (like many misunderstood geniuses do) on August 26, 1931, a final act on a Riviera stage. Sunlight like a spotlight dimming, the sea applauding gently, the world half-aware of its loss. The obituaries attempted summary and failed, because summation requires clarity and Harris lived in permanent superlative. How does one condense someone who refused to be smaller than legend? How to report a life whose own reporting was more exciting than any evidence available?

Perhaps the only way is this: Frank Harris was an influencer before the word existed. He understood that identity can be written into existence. He believed personality was a publication. He styled himself with flamboyance long before social media turned self-invention into an hourly ritual. If today you scroll through people presenting themselves as exaggerated, glamorous versions of themselves, you are witnessing the gospel according to Harris.

The contradictions endure because contradictions are interesting. Harris was brilliant, dishonest, generous, predatory, charming, self-destructive, courageous, insufferable. He championed workers and exploited admiration. He revered literature and degraded taste. He loved women and used them, celebrated them and conquered them, wrote about them like trophies and like teachers. To read him now is to feel both seduced and suspicious. One admires his audacity while distrusting his memory. One laughs at his lies while respecting his commitment to them. He is not a historian’s friend, but he is literature’s accomplice—a man who understood that narrative is more durable than fact.

We remember him not because he was truthful, but because he was unforgettable.

Theodora Vane (b. 1984 in Bath) studied Modern Letters at Oxford and writes about figures who preferred myth over memory. She is convinced that fact is only one option among several good narratives, and rarely the most interesting one.

Cover image: Frank Harris: the only man who could turn autobiography into both a confession booth and a crime scene