a chaste, puritanical, priggish, rather narcissistic little boy, more repelled than attracted to sex, which seemed to me a furtive, guilty, soiling thing, exciting, yes, but nothing whatever to do with those feelings which I had not yet experienced but about which I was already writing a lot of dreadful sentimental verse, called romance and love.

I am not going to make any excuses, old man. I have done my duty towards everybody as far as my nature would allow and I hope people generally will be kind to my memory. All my men pals know of my second family and of their mother, so you won't find it difficult to get on their track.

• The Prisoners of War (first performed 5 July 1925), a play about Captain Conrad's comfortable captivity in Switzerland during World War I. Conrad is tortured by his longing for the attractive young Lieutenant Grayle. Contains the memorable bon mot when a Mme. Louis refers to "the fair sex" and Conrad replies, "The fair sex? And which sex is that?" Ackerley claimed to prefer the title The Interned to The Prisoners of War.
• Hindoo Holiday (1932, revised and expanded 1952), a memoir of Ackerley's brief engagement as secretary to an Indian Maharaja in the city of Chhatarpur, called Chhokrapur (meaning "City of Boys", a joke of Ackerley's) in the book. The spelling of Hindoo was the publisher's choice. Ackerley preferred Hindu.
• My Dog Tulip (1956), an account of living with his dog Queenie. Eventually his relationship with Queenie becomes all-consuming and pushes aside most of his human relationships. The dog's name was changed to Tulip when the editors of Commentary, who had purchased an excerpt, became concerned that using the dog's real name might encourage jokes about Ackerley's sexuality. A 2009 animated feature based on this book featuring Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave and Isabella Rossellini was made.
• We Think the World of You (1960), Ackerley's only novel, which concerns the relationship between an educated middle class man based closely on himself and a working class London family. The story is built around a fictionalized account of how Ackerley acquired Queenie (called "Evie" in the book) and learned to live with her. The book also traces the largely frustrated relationship between the homosexual narrator and Evie's (mostly) heterosexual former owner. The novel was made into a motion picture in 1988 starring Alan Bates and Gary Oldman.
• My Father and Myself (1968), published posthumously. It is a memoir of Ackerley's life and relationship with his father. Along with a memoir by Ackerley's half-sister Diana, it was the source of the 1979 TV movie Secret Orchards.
• My Sister and Myself (1982), published posthumously. Selections from Ackerley's diary, edited by Francis King. The bulk focuses on Ackerley's difficulties with his sister Nancy West (née Ackerley), but there is also a long section about Ackerley and Queenie's difficult stay with Siegfried Sassoon, the model for "Captain Pugh" in My Dog Tulip.

Other works

• Somewhat ironically, as he himself endured his captivity quite placidly, Ackerley was chosen to edit and write the introduction to Escapers All, 15 first-person accounts of World War I POW camp escapees (published by The Bodley Head in 1932).

• Ackerley wrote a short biography of his friend E. M. Forster, called E.M. Forster: A Portrait, which was published posthumously in 1970.

• A volume of his poems, Micheldever and Other Poems, was published posthumously in 1972. He was one of the poets included in Poems by Four Authors (1923).

• Ackerley's letters were published posthumously as The Ackerley Letters, edited by Neville Braybrooke, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

• In the United States, his books are published solely by New York Review Books Classics.

• "If you look like a wild beast, you are expected to behave like one." (My Dog Tulip)
• "To speak the truth, I think that people ought to be upset, and if I had a paper I would upset them all the time; I think that life is so important and, in its workings, so upsetting that nobody should be spared." (Letter to Stephen Spender, December 1955.)
• "If there is good to be said of me, others must report that." (Notebook for My Father and Myself)
• "I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919." (My Father and Myself)
• "'The fair sex? And which sex is that?'" (Captain Conrad to Mme. Louis in The Prisoners of War)
• "About all I knew of [India] when I sailed for it was what I had been able to recollect from my schooldays...that there had been a mutiny there, for instance, and that it looked rather like an inverted Matterhorn on the map, pink because we governed it." (Hindoo Holiday)
• "How arrogant people are in their behaviour to domestic beasts at least. Indeed, yes, we feed upon them and enjoy their flesh; but does that permit us to make fun of them before they die or after they are dead? If it were possible, without disordering one's whole life, to be a vegetarian, I would be one." (My Sister and Myself: The Diaries of J. R. Ackerley)
• "I had gone with him as far along that road as I intended to go; I had indulged in front of him a coarse appetite; it was quite another matter to share with him my satisfaction." (Hindoo Holiday)
• "My chance of finding the Ideal Friend was, like my hair, thinning and receding." (My Father and Myself)
• "I have lost all my old friends, they fear her [his dog Queenie] and look at me with pity or contempt. We live entirely alone. Unless with her I can never go away. I can scarcely call my soul my own. Not that I am complaining, oh no; yet sometimes as we sit and my mind wanders back to the past, to my youthful ambitions and the freedom and independence I used to enjoy, I wonder what in the world has happened to me and how it all came about.... But that leads me into deep waters, too deep for fathoming; it leads me into the darkness of my own mind." (We Think the World of You)
• "It is spring, it is winter, it is summer... Through twilight darkness, through the rain, through sunshine, frost, or heavy dew, I make my way with her across the plateau to the birch woods to give her everything she wants, except the thing she needs." (My Dog Tulip, referring to his dog's frustrated instinct to mate and have children.)
• "And when the time of their arrival drew near, I went out on to my verandah so that I might steal from Time the extra happiness of watching them approach." (We Think the World of You)
• "If Johnny came at all he was always late, and today was no exception; half-past two struck, and 'Not this day,' I said aloud, as though someone stood beside me under the great arch of the sky. 'Take all my other days, but not this one.'" (We Think the World of You)
• "I distrust myself so deeply, that is what I mean. How does one know what one is like? I hide from other people. I hide, too, from myself. The savage, the monkey within me, it cleverly conceals itself. That is civilization, of course. But not cleverly enough. Crises occur, and the façade breaks..." (My Sister and Myself)
• "The rich are very strange." (My Sister and Myself)

• Murray, Stephen O. "Ackerley, Joseph Randolph." Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. Dynes, Wayne R. (ed.), Garland Publishing, 1990. p. 9
• Parker, Peter, Ackerley: The Life of J. R. Ackerley. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1989.