D. H. Lawrence  (1885-1930) Odour of Chrysanthemums LINKS The Academy of American Poets: "High Talk: Influences from the British Isles" http://www.poets.org/lit/exh/ex007fst.htm This interesting background essay on British writers at the Academy of American Poets site includes a page devoted to Lawrence, with a brief biography and selected bibliography. BIOGRAPHY D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930)  David Herbert Lawrence grew up amidst the strife between his genteel and educated mother and his coarse miner father. As a youth in the Nottinghamshire mining village of Eastwood, Lawrence resented the rough ways of his drunken father, and adopted his mother's refined values as his own. Diligence brought him a scholarship to the local high school. Upon graduation, he worked as a clerk and as an elementary school teacher, and, in 1908, earned a teaching certificate from Nottingham University. He published a group of poems in 1909 and The White Peacock, his first novel, in 1911. He resigned his teaching position to devote himself to writing in 1912. That same year he ran away with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley (the sister of the World War I German ace fighter pilot), who left behind a husband and three children. They were married following her divorce in 1914. In 1915, his novel The Rainbow was declared indecent and suppressed in England. Angered by this event and by continual harassment for his outspoken opposition to World War I and his marriage to a prominent German, the Lawrences left England after the war. They traveled widely—in Europe, Australia, Mexico, and the American Southwest—seeking a community receptive to Lawrence's ideas and a climate to restore his failing health. His output was prodigious and included novels, short stories, poems, nonfiction, travel books, and letters. As a mature writer, Lawrence rejected the gentility his mother represented, and began to see his father's earthiness as a virtue. He died of tuberculosis in the south of France.