Lawrence, David Herbert

Born Sept 11, 1885, in Eastwood; died Mar. 2, 1930, in Vence, department of Alpes Maritimes, France. British writer. Son of a miner.

D. H. Lawrence was trained as a schoolteacher. He left England in 1919, and traveled through Europe, America, and Australia. In his realistic novels The White Peacock (1911), Sons and Lovers (1913; Russian translation, 1927), and The Rainbow (1915; Russian translation, The Brangwen Family, 1925), Lawrence ascribed social ills to industrialized civilization, which destroys the bond between man and nature. Lawrence’s work is typified by an interest in the “private being” of the individual, but the Freudian-psychological analysis of such novels as Women in Love (1920), Aaron’s Rod (1922; Russian translation, 1925), Kangaroo (1923), and The Plumed Serpent (1926) overshadowed their treatment of social problems. Lawrence returned to the critically realistic depiction of life in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). He also wrote essays in literary criticism, short stories, poetry, and travel impressions.