Frank Harris was born in Galway and was educated at the Royal School, Armagh and at an English grammar school. He ran away to America when he was fifteen years old, where he attended the State University of Kansas after having worked as a bootblack, a hotel clerk and a cowpunch. When he returned to Europe he studied at Heidelberg and at the age of twenty-seven came to London, where he became editor of the Evening News and the Fortnightly Review and proprietor of the Saturday Review, a leading literary and political paper, between 1894 and 1899. He founded Candia Friend and, as well as short stories and novels, wrote several plays of which Mr and Mrs Daventry was the most successful. He went to jail for contempt of court, and on his release in 1914 he emigrated to America, where he bought Pearson's Magazine. At this time he began a series of books published between 1915 and 1920 as Contemporary Portraits, and he also wrote biographies of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. His autobiography in five volumes, The Life and Loves of Frank Harris, was written between 1923 and 1927 and was banned in England. He died at Nice. It is said that Bernard Shaw remarked of Frank Harris: 'He is neither first-rate nor second-rate nor tenth-rate. He is just his horrible unique self'. [Biography by H. Kingsmill, 1932]

Born:	c.1856
Died:	26 August 1931