J.R. Ackerley

Joseph Randolph Ackerley (1896–1967), known as J.R. Ackerley, was a British author, memoirist, and literary editor whose posthumously published memoir My Father and Myself (1968) is one of the most candid and affecting accounts of a gay life in twentieth-century England.

Ackerley was born in Herne Hill, London. His father, Arthur Ackerley, was a prosperous fruit merchant who – as Ackerley discovered only after his father's death – had maintained a second secret family for decades, fathering three children with a woman in Barnes while remaining married to Ackerley's mother. The revelation shook Ackerley and became the central subject of his memoir, which weaves together an account of his father's double life with an equally frank account of his own: the pursuit of what he called "the ideal friend," an unattainable young working-class man, through the bars, streets, and parks of London across several decades.

He served in the First World War and was captured by the Germans, an experience that generated his first book, The Prisoners of War (1925), a play with a thinly veiled homosexual subtext. His travel memoir Hindoo Holiday (1932) documented his time as private secretary to the Maharajah of Chhatarpur and became a minor classic of wry observation. He was literary editor of the BBC's The Listener from 1935 to 1959, during which time he published early work by W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and others, and maintained a close friendship with E.M. Forster.

His novel We Think the World of You (1960) won the W.H. Smith Literary Award. His book My Dog Tulip (1956), about his German Shepherd Queenie, became a cult text – adapted as an animated film in 2009 – and is considered one of the finest books ever written about a dog.

My Father and Myself was published the year after his death, in 1968 – the same year that homosexuality between men over 21 was decriminalised in England and Wales. It remains in print.