D.H. Lawrence's biography

Name at birth: David Herbert Lawrence
Born: 11 September 1885
Birthplace: Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England
Died: 2 March 1930 (tuberculosis)
Best Known As: Author of Lady Chatterly's Lover

D.H. Lawrence was an English novelist, poet and critic, most famous for his novels Sons and Lovers (1913) and Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928). After a brief career as a teacher, Lawrence devoted himself to writing and in 1911 published his first novel, The White Peacock. In 1912 he ran off with Frieda von Richtenhof Weekley, the wife of a Nottingham University professor; after her divorce in 1914, she and Lawrence married and began travelling while he worked on his writing. They travelled through Europe and North America until his death, from tuberculosis, in 1930.

Lawrence's novels are known for Oedipal anxieties and sometimes explicit descriptions of sexual relationships, a rarity in literature at the time and shocking to his contemporaries. Lady Chatterly's Lover, probably his best-known work, was considered "obscene" and was banned in the United States and England for three decades. After the 1960's, however, his books became required reading for most university students, and he is still considered an influential figure of 20th century literature. His other works include the novels Women in Love (1921), The Plumed Serpent (1926) and The Rainbow (1915), the play David (1926), poems collected in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1925) and a book of criticism, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923).

The English novelist, poet, and essayist David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) took as his major theme the relationship between men and women, which he regarded as disastrously wrong in his time.

Born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, on Sept. 11, 1885, D. H. Lawrence was the son of a little-educated coal miner and a mother of middle-class origins who fought with the father and his limited way of life so that the children might escape it or, as Lawrence once put it, "rise in the world." Their quarrel and estrangement, and the consequent damage to the children, became the subject of perhaps his most famous novel, Sons and Lovers (1913). Critics immediately regarded it as a brilliant illustration of Sigmund Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. Lawrence was trained to be a teacher at Nottingham University College and taught at Davidson Road School in Croydon until 1912, when his health failed. The great friend of his youth, Jessie Chambers, who was the real-life counterpart of Miriam in Sons and Lovers, had sent some of his work to the English Review. The editor, Ford Madox Ford, hailed him at once as a find, and Lawrence began his writing career.