D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards
Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930)
was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and
painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an
extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and
industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional
health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct.
Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he
endured 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 he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his
death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his
considerable talents. 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 Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis
championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much
of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the
English novel. Lawrence is now valued by many as a visionary thinker and
significant representative of modernism in English literature.
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