HARRIS, Frank.

£450 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Contemporary Portraits. First edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "To Margaret Viereck from the author, who admires her grace & beauty, more than any writing. Frank Harris. New York, 3 Washington Square. In this year of DisGrace 1915". A fine association: Margaret "Gretchen" Viereck was the wife of the German-American poet and writer George Sylvester Viereck (1884-1962); the two were married in September 1915, the year of Harris's inscription. During the First World War, the Munich-born Viereck was an outspoken supporter of Germany, as was Harris. "Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War [Harris] sailed for New York, where his war articles (collected in 1915 as England or Germany?) attacked Britain's war aims, legal and prison systems [he had just been released from Brixton jail], philistinism, snobbery, and prudery. His paranoia increased when he was branded a traitor. Desperate for money, in 1915 he published Contemporary Portraits: there is a bitter, jealous tone to this book, except in the chapters on John Davidson and Richard Middleton, two unappreciated poets who were driven to suicide, with whose disappointment he sympathized" (ODNB).

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