D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence was an English novelist, poet and essayist, born on 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, a mining town in Nottinghamshire. His father was a coal miner and his mother a former schoolteacher, and the tension between their worlds shaped much of his early writing. He trained as a teacher before turning fully to literature. After 1912 he lived largely abroad, travelling through Italy, Australia, Mexico and the United States, often in poor health. He wrote about love, desire, class and the damage that industrial society does to the human spirit, and he tried to describe feeling and the body with unusual frankness. Several of his books were censored or banned in his lifetime, and he faced hostility from critics and officials. He also wrote vivid short stories, travel books and poems. He died on 2 March 1930, aged 44. His work remains widely read and argued over, and he is regarded as one of the major figures of twentieth-century English fiction.