D.H. Lawrence

Born in 1885 in Eastwood, a Nottinghamshire mining village, David Herbert Lawrence was the fourth child of a barely literate coal miner and a former schoolteacher who poured her frustrated ambitions into her sons. Lawrence won a scholarship to Nottingham High School and briefly worked as a clerk and pupil-teacher before studying at University College, Nottingham. His first novel, The White Peacock (1911), appeared while he was still teaching elementary school in Croydon. In 1912 he eloped to Germany with Frieda Weekley, the aristocratic wife of his former professor, a scandal that set the pattern for a life lived in defiance of English respectability. The Rainbow (1915) was seized and destroyed by court order for obscenity. He and Frieda wandered through Italy, Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico, producing novels, stories, poems, travel writing, and paintings at ferocious speed. Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) pushed further into the tangled connections between sexuality, class, and industrial civilization. Tuberculosis, which had shadowed him for years, finally killed him on March 2, 1930, in Vence, France. He was forty-four, and had published more than forty books.

In June 1929, nude paintings by Lawrence went on show at London's Warren Gallery, drawing crowds by the thousand. On the fifth of July the police arrived, pushed through the gallery, and carried off thirteen canvases under the Obscene Publications Act. A magistrate later pronounced them gross and hideous.