Author: D H Lawrence
D H Lawrence, [David Herbert Richards]
1885-1930
Novelist, short-story writer, poet, critic, playwright and essayist.
He was born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, and educated at Nottingham High School and University College, Nottingham. His father was a coal-miner, his mother from a family with genteel aspirations; emotional frictions between the parents, and Lawrence's close relationship with his mother, left important traces in his later writing.
In 1912 he met Frieda Weekley (von Richthofen), daughter of a German baron and wife of a professor at Nottingham. They went to Germany together and were married after Frieda's divorce in 1914.
During World War I the Lawrences at first lived in London, then moved to Cornwall.
His most popular books: Sons and Lovers (1913); "The Rainbow (1915); Women in Love (1917); Kangaroo(1923);.
Some of his books were prosecuted by the authorities and banned on grounds of obscenity. Further harassment occurred when the Lawrences were accused of spying for the Germans; they were officially expelled from Cornwall in 1917.
Between 1922 and 1926 he and Frieda left Italy to live intermittently in Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico and Mexico.
His last novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) was published in Florence in 1928 and an expurgated edition published in England and USA in 1932, but had to await favourable court verdicts in 1959 and 1960 before it became freely available in its original form.
He died from tuberculosis in France, on 2 March 1930.
