Frank Harris

Oscar Wilde's reputation has shifted dramatically during the twentieth century from outcast in the wake of his trials for homosexual offences, to martyr to the gay cause in the 1980s and '90s, to important figure in the history of writing in English. Ruth Robbins introduces Wilde through a focus on his manipulations of genre and sets Wilde's life and work in its literary and cultural context.

To the generation of 1930, Frank Harris is already a legend. At seventy-five he sits on his balcony by the still Mediterranean waters and remembers his youth. To us, to whom he reveals with the assurance of an eyewitness to many of last century's men of light and leading, his youth appears all business and discourse with personages whose stories are now a part of history - personages like Emerson and Whitman and Carlyle and Ruskin and Whistler, like King Edward and Debs and Bismarck. Others of the Harris gallery are still with us. They were young when he was young, and of one fellowship with him in labor and aspiration. Among these, he names three, Galsworthy and Wells and Shaw, who are still the giants of the world of letters, each in the winter of his life eager about the human future to the end of time. But Harris remembers his youth, and it seems to him golden. Maybe it is because he had a youth as these men had not, a youth wherein the reality was as the boy's dream, and the dream as the reality.

A wonderful autobiography of a man who preceded his time by appreciating in the 1920 that personal desires and impulses, including sexual, had crucial influence on his professional and personal development. For being frank - he changed his first name from James when eighteen to reflect his priority, his autobiography was banned in Britain and America until 1963. His extraordinary life summary, having risen from a poor Irish boy to literary king maker in the height of Victorian London through the building of Brooklyn bridge, the Chicago fire, smuggling cattle in Texas and law studies in Kansas, made him friends of such literary stars and Oscar Wilde and D.H. Lawrence among others. With sharp perception and immense memory we receive a broad image of the forty years from the 1880s to the 1920, mostly in London, but also in France and Germany.

Details the race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union for superiority in atomic weaponry since the inception of the Manhattan Project in 1939, and analyzes the danger of unleashing phenomenally destructive weapons upon the world.