D.H. Lawrence Biography

Writer

Name at birth: David Herbert Lawrence

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).

Extra credit: His wife, Frieda, was a cousin of Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the World War I German flying ace.

Lawrence joins Araham Lincoln and Conrad Veidt in our loop Exhumation Celebration.