D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was born 11 September 1885 in England and spent his career writing against the grain of industrial society, insisting that vitality and instinct mattered more than convention. Sons and Lovers arrived in 1913, then The Rainbow in 1915 and Women in Love in 1920 - each one radical enough in its treatment of romance and sexuality to draw censors. By the time Lady Chatterley's Lover appeared in 1928, with its explicit language and unvarnished desire, Lawrence had already left England for what he called a "savage enough pilgrimage" through voluntary exile. He died 2 March 1930, widely dismissed as a pornographer trading in tastelessness. E. M. Forster wrote an obituary calling him "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation," and later F. R. Leavis defended both his artistic integrity and moral seriousness - a slow reversal that turned persecution into posthumous vindication.