D. H. Lawrence

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (September 11, 1885 – March 2, 1930) was an important and controversial English writer, and one of the most important writers in English Modernism. Lawrence was prolific. His output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism and personal letters, but he is most remembered for pushing the limits of what was acceptable in literary fiction. While other Modernists, like Joyce and Woolf, were content to radicalize the forms of literature, Lawrence was committed to expanding the range of literary subject-matter. In particular, by incorporating Freudian psychoanalysis, frank descriptions of sexuality, and mystical religious themes that were quite shocking to the audiences of his time. Many of Lawrence's works were banned or left unpublished during his life and, like Lord Byron, Lawrence only gained the recognition he deserved in the decades after his death.

Although he is now esteemed as one of the most important figures in the early history of Modernism, Lawrence remains controversial. His prodigious output is notoriously uneven; and Lawrence, laboring in obscurity, never lived long enough to refine some of his wilder fancies into coherent ideas. Other critics criticize Lawrence's explicitness, and it is true that some of his lesser works were written more to shock than to truly enlighten the mind with the brilliance of art. Nonetheless, Lawrence was a genius of the highest order, and his most exemplary poems and novels are among the most influential works of twentieth-century literature.

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