Alexander Trocchi

Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi ( TROK-ee; 30 July 1925 – 15 April 1984) was a Scottish novelist.

Early life and career

Trocchi was born in Glasgow to Alfred (formerly Alfredo) Trocchi, a music-hall performer of Italian parentage, and Annie (née Robertson), who ran a boarding house and died of food poisoning when Trocchi was a teenager. He attended Hillhead High School in the city and Cally House School in Gatehouse of Fleet, having been evacuated there during World War II. After working as a seaman on the Murmansk convoys, he studied English Literature and Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and was awarded second-class honours in 1950.

Without graduating, Trocchi obtained a travelling grant that enabled him to relocate to continental Europe. In the early 1950s he lived in Paris and edited the literary magazine Merlin, which published Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Christopher Logue, and Pablo Neruda, amongst others. Although not published in Merlin, American writer Terry Southern, who lived in Paris from 1948 to 1952, became a close friend of both Trocchi and his colleague Richard Seaver, and the three later co-edited the anthology Writers In Revolt (1962). Though Merlin had been established somewhat in rivalry with the Paris Review, George Plimpton also had served on the magazine's editorial board. Trocchi claimed that this journal came to an end when the US State Department cancelled its many subscriptions in protest over an article by Jean-Paul Sartre praising the homoeroticism of Jean Genet.

Maurice Girodias published most of Trocchi's novels through Olympia Press, often written under pen names, such as Frances Lengel and Carmencita de las Lunas. Girodias also published My Life and Loves: Fifth Volume, which purported to be the final volume of the autobiography of Irish-American writer Frank Harris.