Lawrence, D. H.

1885–1930

British Novelist and Poet

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence ranks as one of the great modernist authors and a key influence on the “lost generation” of American writers of the early twentieth century. His provocative novels, questioning Victorian cultural assumptions prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic, heralded the death of the protective and powerful Victorian father figure and the appearance of a more ambiguous post–Victorian picture of masculinity and male sexuality.

Born in Nottinghamshire, England, Lawrence grew up amid the strife of his parents' unhappy marriage, and the tensions between his miner father's working-class sensibilities and his mother's more genteel background dramatically shaped his portrayals of gender. Lawrence depicts this gendered conflict in the autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers (1913). Protagonist Paul Morel's father symbolizes sensuality ...