"d. H. Lawrence"

You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly controversial novelist who transformed, for better and for worse, the way we write about sex and emotions; he was a wonderful poet; he was an essayist of burning curiosity, expansive lyricism, odd humor, and radical intelligence, equaled, perhaps, only by Virginia Woolf. Here Geoff Dyer, one of the finest essayists of our day, draws on the whole range of Lawrence's published essays to reintroduce him to a new generation of readers for whom the essay has become an important genre.

Novelist, poet, social critic and above all in his own words 'an outsider', D. H. Lawrence was described by E. M. Forster as 'the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation'. Partly because of his early death, partly because of the harassment he suffered and partly because of the poverty he endured, there is a deep sense of sadness underlying his life - despite the brilliance, the enormous talent and the unwavering dedication to his wife.