English writer David Herbert (D. H.) Lawrence was BOTD in 1885. Born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire to a coal mining family, he escaped a life in the mines by winning a scholarship to attend Nottingham High School. He left school at 16 to work as a clerk in a factory, but had to give up work after an attack of pneumonia. With the encouragement of family friends, he passed his school examinations and began writing fiction. He trained as a teacher at University College, Nottingham, publishing his first poems in the English Review. In 1912, he eloped with Frieda von Richthofen, the German-born wife of one of his colleagues, living in German and Italy. His found literary success with his 1913 novel Sons and Lovers, introducing what became his trademark themes of Freudian mother-love, tormented marriages, class struggle and a recurring obsession with homosexuality. Lawrence and Frieda returned to London in 1914 to marry, befriending Modernist writers Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murray, Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes. His next novel, published in two volumes as The Rainbow and Women in Love, based on the Lawrences’ turbulent friendship with Mansfield and Murray, were banned due to their frank depictions of sex and homosexuality (reflecting Lawrence’s anxieties over his attraction to men). Forced to leave Cornwall after their neighbours accused them of being German spies, the Lawrences left England permanently in 1919. They living a nomadic and hand-to-mouth existence for the next decade, travelling through Europe, Australia, the United States and Mexico, experiences recounted in Lawrence’s novels Kangaroo, The Boy in the Bush and The Plumed Serpent. Lawrence died in 1930 of advanced turberculosis, aged 44. He is best known for his novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a sexually explicit and expletive-filled story of a married woman who falls in love with her husband’s gamekeeper, partially inspired by E. M. Forster‘s unpublished novel Maurice. Published privately by Lawrence in 1928, the unexpurgated text was first published by Penguin Books in 1960. An obscenity prosecution quickly followed, with mass police confiscation of the books. The resulting obscenity trial became a national sensation, and a litmus test for post-war British morality. A number of writers and intellectuals testified in support of Lawrence’s book, including Forster, academic Richard Hoggart and John Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich, who described the book’s scenes of violent sex and sodomy as “essentially sacred”. Chief prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones’ question to the jury “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” was widely ridiculed, becoming comic shorthand for Britain’s out-of-date ruling-class. The trial’s not guilty verdict resulted in huge sales of the novel. Lawrence was unofficially crowned the father of Britain’s sexual liberation movement, wittily referred to in Philip Larkin’s poem Annus Mirabilis (“Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/(which was rather late for me) – /Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP“). Lawrence’s status as a progressive pioneer was comprehensively trashed by feminist critics Kate Millett and Germaine Greer, who highlighted his misogyny, eroticisation of violence and prurient obsession with lesbianism. Biographers and critics continue to debate whether Lawrence ever acted on his homosexual desires, citing his fraught, erotically-charged friendships with Murray and a Cornish farmer named William Hocking. His novels and stories have been frequently adapted for the screen, notably Ken Russell‘s films of Women in Love and The Rainbow and innumerable adaptations of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.