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.