About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is the author of Gary Cooper, Scott Fitzgerald and Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Reviews

This clean, energetic, and untendentious biography of D.H. Lawrence...is most welcome for its candid narrative and new information about the novelist's childhood, marriage, sexual life, health, and always complex friendships. Meyers has produced a readable, scholarly biography that doesn't break its subject on the wheel of some reductive thesis or bury him in self-serving detail. Lawrence lives
*The Wall Street Journal*

A fine piece of work. It is dispassionate, it is cool, not cold. It sets out the record and untangles conflicting accounts...Meyers is scrupulous. He hardly ever fails to put the other side's case. He does not whitewash Lawrence...Meyers seems just and wise about Lawrence's feelings for his wife Frieda and hers for him. He seems to understand both, to feel for both.
*The New York Review Of Books*

It is a daunting task to record the life of a genius and prophet. Meyers is up to the task. He presents both new material about Lawrence's life as well as a cogent summation of what we already know. His biography is a scholarly, lucid, and comprehensive account of the writer whom E. M. Forster called ' the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation'...the detached elan with which Meyers analyzes and makes familiar the tempestuous-yet -binding relationship [between Lawrence and Frieda] is one of the more engaging aspects of the book. By sketching Frieda's numerous marital infidelities Meyers gives us Lawrence rooted in the human clay of marriage, the ' living man,' the author of great and original literature.
*The Christian Science Monitor*

This is the first full-scale life of Lawrence since Harry Moore's The Priest of Love ( LJ 2/15/74). Though Meyers is sympathetic, his Lawrence is much less dainty and much more troubled than Moore's. For example, he's not afraid to depict the tempestuous marriage to Frieda as destructive as well as sustaining. At the same time some matters of speculation are presented as fact, and Meyers treats Lawrence's latent homosexuality with particular heavy-handedness. There are a number of errors, and readers may have their doubts about the ``significant new information'' Meyers claims to have revealed. Further, many passages are drawn--often word-for-word--from the prolific Meyers's earlier books. The author has been enterprising in interviewing those aged survivors with first-hand contact with Lawrence. One can hope that this readable mass-market biography--published by one of its subject's own publishers--will generate new readers for Lawrence.-- Keith Cushman, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro

This clean, energetic, and untendentious biography of D.H. Lawrence...is most welcome for its candid narrative and new information about the novelist's childhood, marriage, sexual life, health, and always complex friendships. Meyers has produced a readable, scholarly biography that doesn't break its subject on the wheel of some reductive thesis or bury him in self-serving detail. Lawrence lives * The Wall Street Journal *
A fine piece of work. It is dispassionate, it is cool, not cold. It sets out the record and untangles conflicting accounts...Meyers is scrupulous. He hardly ever fails to put the other side's case. He does not whitewash Lawrence...Meyers seems just and wise about Lawrence's feelings for his wife Frieda and hers for him. He seems to understand both, to feel for both. -- Noel Annan * The New York Review Of Books *
It is a daunting task to record the life of a genius and prophet. Meyers is up to the task. He presents both new material about Lawrence's life as well as a cogent summation of what we already know. His biography is a scholarly, lucid, and comprehensive account of the writer whom E. M. Forster called ' the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation'...the detached elan with which Meyers analyzes and makes familiar the tempestuous-yet -binding relationship [between Lawrence and Frieda] is one of the more engaging aspects of the book. By sketching Frieda's numerous marital infidelities Meyers gives us Lawrence rooted in the human clay of marriage, the ' living man,' the author of great and original literature. * The Christian Science Monitor *