My Life — Frank Harris

Frank Harris
Frank Harris Publishing Company · New York · 1925
First American Edition · First Printing · Volume I

The Book:
The First American Edition · First Printing of Frank Harris’s My Life, Volume I, published in New York in 1925 by Harris’s own Frank Harris Publishing Company. The book is the expurgated American version of the first volume of My Life and Loves, Harris’s notoriously candid autobiography, which had first circulated privately in Europe. The American edition shortened the title and removed or altered sexually explicit material considered hazardous for open commercial publication. 294 pp. Original quarter green cloth over dark brown textured paper-covered boards retained. No dust jacket present.

Condition:
Good. Original quarter green cloth and dark brown textured paper-covered boards remain intact but show substantial wear, including exposed board at the corners and edges, pronounced fraying and cloth loss at the spine head, additional wear at the tail, and rubbing and soiling to the cloth and boards. Interior is considerably stronger, substantially clean and complete. A small unidentified handwritten notation appears on the rear free endpaper. No dust jacket present.

Story Of The Book

Frank Harris had already written the book America was not supposed to read.

His autobiography My Life and Loves began appearing through private publication in Europe in the early 1920s, where its extraordinary sexual candor could circulate outside the ordinary commercial channels constrained by British and American obscenity law.

When Harris brought the work to New York in 1925, it changed.

My Life and Loves became simply My Life. The explicit material that had made the autobiography notorious was reduced or removed, producing an American version that could circulate more safely in the open market. Princeton University’s Frank Harris archive specifically identifies this 1925 New York edition as expurgated.

The censorship history is therefore visible before the book is even opened: the title changed, and so did the text.

This is not the forbidden version that evaded censorship. It is what remained after the work encountered the boundaries of American publication.

Why It’s In The Collection

My Life belongs in Consigned to Darkness because censorship is sometimes most revealing not in the books that disappear, but in the books that survive after being changed.

The earlier privately published My Life and Loves represents one strategy for confronting obscenity restrictions: move outside ordinary publishing channels and circulate the complete text privately.

This 1925 American edition represents the opposite strategy. Harris altered the work so it could enter broader commercial circulation.

That makes the volume a particularly tangible censorship object. It preserves not simply a controversial autobiography, but the version created by accommodation to the limits of what American readers were permitted to receive.

The forbidden text tells us what Harris wanted to publish.

This book tells us what the market would allow him to publish.

Collection Categories: Censorship · Free Expression · Sexuality & Obscenity · Publication History · Literature · Memoir & Testimony · Pornography & Erotica

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Authentication Evidence

• Title page identifies the work as My Life by Frank Harris, Volume I.

• Title page identifies the publisher as Frank Harris Publishing Co., 48 Broadway, New York.

• Copyright page explicitly states “Copyright, 1925 by Frank Harris.”

• Copyright page states “Printed in the United States of America.”

• Copyright page announces that “Volume II of My Life is on the press and will be issued presently,” supporting identification as part of the original publication sequence.

• Volume collates to 294 pages, matching independently recorded copies of the 1925 Frank Harris Publishing Company edition.

• Original quarter binding of green cloth over dark brown textured paper-covered boards remains present and corresponds to documented examples of the edition.

• Princeton University’s Esar Levine Collection of Frank Harris identifies My Life, Volume I as published in the United States in 1925 by the Frank Harris Publishing Company and explicitly describes the edition as an expurgated version of Harris’s autobiography.

• The 1925 New York issue is therefore correctly identified as the First American Edition of this expurgated American form of Volume I.

• No later-printing statement appears in the supplied photographs.

• The contemporary notice that Volume II “is on the press and will be issued presently,” together with the correct publisher, pagination, and binding, supports First Printing identification.

• No limitation statement or copy number is present or expected; this is the ordinary trade issue of the 1925 American edition.

• No signature attributable to Frank Harris is present.

• The small handwritten notation on the rear free endpaper is unidentified and is not treated as authorial or significant provenance.

• No evidence of later publisher issue, rebinding, facsimile production, or replacement components is observed.

• Observable physical and bibliographic evidence supports identification as the 1925 First American Edition · First Printing of Volume I.