David Herbert Lawrence (September 11, 1885 -
March 2, 1930) was the son of a teacher and a coal miner. His working class parentage had a great impact on the literary style of this British writer who wrote novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters. He also produced a series of explicit expressionistic paintings later in life. He married Frieda Weekley née von Richthofen, sister of Manfred von Richthofen, on July 13 1914.
He was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom.
Lawrence was one of the most important English writers of the 20th century. Among his many works, very famous are his novels Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). The publication of the latter caused a scandal due to its explicit sex scenes and perhaps particularly because the lover was working-class, and an obscenity trial followed in Britain. The British publisher, Penguin Books, won the court case that ensued. This was not the only controversial novel by the author, for instance The Rainbow was banned for its obscenity which consisted of the use of swear words and talk of sex. Several of his paintings were almost destroyed due to their depiction of pubic hair.
He died in Vence, France.
His birthplace, in Eastwood, 8a Victoria Street, is now a museum.
Partial list of works
Novels
- The White Peacock (1911) - the tragedy of a man who marries the wrong woman
- The Tresspasser (1912)
- Sons and Lovers (1913) - called Paul Morel while in progress
- The Rainbow (1915) - criticised for obscenity and copies were destroyed
- Women in Love (1920) - sequel to 'The rainbow'
- The Lost Girl (1920)
- Aaron's Rod (1922) - about a man who walks out on his wife, with whom he has a destructive relationship, in order to start a new life
- The Fox (1923) - short novel
- The Captain's Doll (1923) - short novel, about an abandoned marriage and subsequent loveless affair
- The Ladybird (1923) - short novel
- Kangaroo (1923)
- The Boy in the bush (1924) - written from a manuscript given to him by Molly Skinner.
- St. Mawr (1925) - short novel, one of his two North American fictions
- The Plumed Serpent (1926) - called Quetzalcoatl in progress and is about an English woman experiencing a religious revolution in Mexico
- The Woman Who Rode Away (1928) - one of his two North American fictions about a woman who gives herself up to a group of Native Americans. this novel reveals much about Lawerence's opinion of American consciousness
- The Escaped Cock/The Man Who Died (1929)
- Lady Chatterley's Lover (printed privately in Florence during 1928, banned in the UK until 1960) - his most famous and highest earning novel. A story of a middle-class woman and her enlightening sexual relationship (written quite explicitly) with a gamekeeper - an outsider even to the working class. The novel condones their relationship, and is a story about living and loving passionately.
Published posthumously
- Mr Noon (1984)
- Vigin and the gypsy (1930)
Unfinished
Poetry
- Love Poems and others (1913)
- Look! We Have Come Through! (1917)
- New Poems (1918)
- Bay : a book of poems (1919)
- Birds, beasts and flowers (1923)
- Pansies (1929)
Plays
- The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1914)
- A Collier's Friday Night (1934)
- Touch and Go (1920)
- David (1926)- A modern man developing out of the primordial religious self
- Mornings in Mexico (1927)
Stories
- The Prussian Officer and other stories (1914)
Non-fiction
- Movements in European history (1921)
- Psychoanalysis and the unconscious (1921)
- Fantasia of the unconscious (1922)
- Studies in classic American literature (1923)
- Sea and Sardinia (1921) - travel book
- Apocalypse (1931) - His last book touching on primitive symbolism, paganism and pre-Christian ideology
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