David Herbert Lawrence was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, literary critic, travel writer, essayist, and painter. His modernist works reflect on modernity, social alienation and industrialization, while championing sexuality, vitality and instinct. Several of his novels, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover, were the subject of censorship trials for their radical portrayals of sexuality and use of explicit language.
Lawrence in 1929
D. H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire
Lawrence at age 21 in 1906
Commemorative plaque in Colworth Road, Croydon, south London
Modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterised by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new." This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of the time. The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century. In Modernist Literature, Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world".
Modernist literature scholar David Thorburn saw connections between literary style and impressionist painters such as Claude Monet. Modernist writers, like Monet's paintings of water lilies, suggested an awareness of art as art, rejected realistic interpretations of the world and dramatized "a drive towards the abstract".