Most of those who recognize Frank Harris's name today know him as the author of the sexually abundant and explicit four-volume autobiography My Life and Loves (1922-1927). Some may also know him as one of the personalities of the 1890s: a man equal in contemporary reckoning to W. E. Henley or Robert Louis Stevenson and equal in conversation even to the renowned Oscar Wilde, who was his good friend, as was George Bernard Shaw. As editor of the Fortnightly Review and then the Saturday Review throughout the fin de siècle, Harris brought good judgment to his journals and made many a writer's reputation.

Short and stocky with swarthy skin, a handle-bar moustache, straight black hair slicked back and parted in the middle, large ears, a wide nose, and a booming bass voice that was rarely still, he seemed a great anomaly to the educated Englishman. He...