WILDE, Oscar - HARRIS, Frank.

£750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions. Second privately printed edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "To Clarence E. Thompson, from his friend, the author, in token of immediate sympathy, Frank Harris, Oct. 1920". Thompson (c.1876-1945) was a writer and political publicist. He worked on the Presidential campaigns of Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.The Irish-born journalist Frank Harris (1855-1931) led a dissolute life that some observers believed to have been redeemed only in his loyal support of the disgraced Wilde, as demonstrated by this biography, of "impressionistic value despite factual vagaries" (ODNB). George Bernard Shaw, in his appended letter to the author, Memories of Oscar Wilde, writes: "Now that you have written the best life of Oscar Wilde, let us have the best life of Frank Harris" (p. 32).The first private and trade editions were published two years earlier.

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