D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist and poet, ranked among the most influential and controversial literary figures of the 20th century. In his more than 40 books he celebrated his vision of the natural, whole human being, opposing the artificiality of modern industrial society with its dehumanization of life and love. His novels were misunderstood, however, and attacked and even suppressed because of their frank treatment of sexual matters.

David Herbert Lawrence was born September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal miner. His mother had been a schoolteacher. The disparity in social status between his parents was a recurrent motif in Lawrence's fiction. A graduate (1908) of University College, Nottingham, Lawrence published his first poems in the English Review in 1909 and his first novel, The White Peacock, in 1911. The most significant of his early fiction, Sons and Lovers (1913), which was in large part autobiographical, deals with life in a mining town.

In 1912 Lawrence eloped to the Continent with Frieda Weekley, his former professor's wife (sister of the German aviator Freiherr Manfred von Richthofen), marrying her two years later, after her divorce. Their intense, stormy life together supplied material for much of his writing. The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921)—perhaps his best novels—explore with outspoken candor the sexual and psychological relationships of men and women. In this period he also wrote two books of verse, Love Poems and Others (1913) and Look! We Have Come Through (1917).

Lawrence led a harried life in England during World War I because of his wife's German origin and his own opposition to the war. Tuberculosis added to his problems, and in 1919 he began a period of restless wandering to find a more healthful climate. His travels provided the locales of several books: the Abruzzi region of Italy for The Lost Girl (1920), Sardinia for Sea and Sardinia (1921), and Australia for Kangaroo (1923). During stays in Mexico and Taos, New Mexico (1923-25), he wrote The Plumed Serpent (1926), a novel reflecting Lawrence's fascination with Aztec civilization. His most original poetry, published in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), flowed from his experience of nature in the southwestern United States and the Mediterranean region.

From 1926 on Lawrence lived chiefly in Italy, where he wrote and rewrote his most notorious novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), which deals with the sexually fulfilling love affair between a member of the nobility and her husband's gamekeeper. An expurgated version was published in 1932. Lawrence's third and most sexually explicit version of this work was not published until 1959 in the U.S. and 1960 in England; it had been suppressed in both countries until the courts upheld its publication.

Lawrence died March 2, 1930, in a sanatorium in Vence, France.