T.E. Lawrence

English · 1888 to 1935

Born Thomas Edward Lawrence on August 16, 1888, in Tremadog, Wales, he was the second of five illegitimate sons of Sir Thomas Chapman, an Anglo-Irish baronet who had left his wife to live with the family governess under the assumed surname Lawrence. He grew up in Oxford, read history at Jesus College, and walked over a thousand miles alone through Ottoman Syria studying Crusader castles for his thesis. Archaeology took him to Carchemish on the Euphrates, where he learned Arabic and the desert that would shape his life. When war came he joined British military intelligence in Cairo, and from 1916 served as liaison to the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule, riding with Emir Faisal's irregulars in a guerrilla campaign that culminated in the capture of Aqaba and the entry into Damascus in 1918. He emerged as "Lawrence of Arabia," celebrated by the journalist Lowell Thomas, and bitterly disillusioned by the postwar carving up of the Arab lands he had promised would be free. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his vast and tormented account of the campaign, was privately printed in 1926 after he lost an early manuscript at Reading station and rewrote it from memory. Shunning fame, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force under the name Ross, then as Aircraftman T. E. Shaw, working on high-speed rescue boats and translating Homer's Odyssey (1932). His memoir of ranks life, The Mint, appeared posthumously. He died on May 19, 1935, at the age of forty-six, six days after losing control of his Brough Superior motorcycle near his Dorset cottage while swerving to avoid two boys on bicycles.