by Sue Bluze

Created on: January 30, 2007   Last Updated: January 17, 2010

David Hertbert Lawrence  who is often better known as D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), was an important, influential and  extremely controversial English novelist, storywriter, critic, poet and painter, often regarded one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. Lawrence had a prolific and diverse output of work, including novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary critism and personal letters. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, sexuality, and instinctive behaviour, many of his critics believe him to have a chauvenist attitude to women, but its true that the major influences in his life were his wife and mother and he obviously adored them both.

Lawrence's unsettling opinions earned him many enemies and he endured hardships, official persecution, censorship and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile. At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. Even in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire where he was born and grew up he was remembered with a certain amount of suspicion and ambivalence by those that actually knew him.

However, novellist and writer E. M. Forster,in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation. Later, the influential critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature, although some object to the stereotypical macho attitudes toward women and sexuality found in his works, but these have to be seen in the context of both the times and the culture of the mining village he grew up in.

David Herbert Lawrence [known as Bert to the family] was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, a small mining town in central England in an area known as the East Midlands. Within two weeks of his birth the child had bronchitis. It was to be a warning: Lawrence's lungs would plague him all his life.

He was the fourth child of a struggling coal miner, Arthur John Lawrence, who was also known as a heavy drinker. Arthur was born at the village of Brinsley, Nottinghamshire

• 1
• 2
• 3
• ...
• 8
• Next Page >>