My Dog Tulip is J. R. Ackerley’s (1896-1967) memoir of the purebred Alsatian (German Shepherd) bitch that he rescued from a neglectful owner. Ackerley, a British memoirist, novelist and playwright and editor of the BBC magazine The Listener, treats the willful and skittish dog — prone to biting strangers and relieving herself on sidewalks and carpets — with great tenderness in this encomium. Yet the memoir is not only a portrait of a beloved pet; it is also an account of the difficulties of violating social convention in conservative postwar British society — a topic painfully familiar to the openly homosexual author.
Published in 1956 in the UK and in 1965 in America, the book puzzled and s…
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