Ackerley: The Life of J.R. Ackerley

The English writer J. R. Ackerley (1896-1967) is best known today as the author of "My Dog Tulip", "My Father and Myself", and "We Think the World of You", books which have become classics of their kind and which have recently been reissued in the United States to widespread acclaim. Ackerley is a twentieth-century exemplar of a time-honored English tradition: the odd individualist whose steadfast adherence to his peculiar way of seeing eventually becomes representative. His books are models of lucid, often comic self-exploration, for Ackerley's primary concern as a writer was to attempt to understand his own nature. A complex, contradictory, and combative character, a fierce champion of personal freedom, Ackerley was a promiscuous homosexual who also spent much of his life in the often frustrated pursuit of the "Ideal Friend". In many ways, his most successful relationship was with his German Shepherd, Queenie, the heroin of "My Dog Tulip". Ackerley served as literary editor of 'The Listener', one of England's leading journals, from 1935 to 1959 and is renowned for his achievements as an editor. Among his friends were the leading writers of his time, especially E. M. Forster, but also Clive Bell, Kenneth Clark, Wyndham Lewis, Herbert Read, Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Spender, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Peter parker's engaging, frank, and moving narrative of Ackerley's public and private life is an engrossing and provocative portrait of a singular man who is coming to be appreciated as a major figure in modern English letters.