My Life and Loves

Yet my virtue was destined to suffer one defeat. One evening, a girl we had met, who was almost completely white, was encouraged by Karl to come nude to my bed. I was tossing about asleep in the night when she came and laid down beside me, or rather on me. The heat of her body had excited me before I even awoke, and before I was fully conscious I was enjoying her. I felt no disappointment when I saw her: I have seen Italian girls with darker skins and coarser features; but I cannot say that she gave me any extraordinary thrill. Yet, she did her best and the game of love to her was the best game in the world. She delighted in teaching me all the Swahili terms for the sex and for sensual pleasures. And when I used them she would scream with enjoyment.

This girl was rather intelligent, and so I asked her about sexual perversions.

She seemed to think there was nothing in them, that naturally all human beings took what pleasure they could get whenever they could get it.

Frank Harris is one of America's literary luminaries, and whether you consider him a Walter Mittyesque fantasist or a man who wrote just as he lived, there is no doubt that he had a very extraordinary life indeed. In Volume IV of his work My Life and Loves he recounts with unrestrained abandon how he fell in love with literature and writing, how he explored the mysterious continent of Africa, and the many young women he had the pleasure of laying with.

Mixing historical fact with a sprinkling of artistic license, Frank Harris paints a romantic picture of late nineteenth century Europe and Africa, where adventure and discovery lie beyond every bend and curve. Between rubbing shoulders with figures such as Oscar Wilde, and Emile Zola, Frank as always regales us in the most shocking of seductions, the most vigorous of couplings, and voyeuristic group-menages in a wonderfully graphic prose that bounds along at the insatiable pace of its protagonist and author.

Locus Elm Press is proud to present this first volume, considerately presented and carefully edited for your reading pleasure. Volumes I, II, and III, also available.