The Portable D.H. Lawrence

by D.H. Lawrence, Diana Trilling (Editor)

Eight stories and novelettes, including "The Prussian Officer'," "The Rocking-Horse Winner," and "The Fox." Self contained sections from The Rainbow and Women in Love. Poems, Travel-writings, Letters, Essays, Criticism. "A perfect introduction to Lawrence"--The New Yorker

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literature, Poetry, Short Stories

692 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...

Reviews

[Austin Outhavong · Rating 4 out of 5]

i dont normally encounter authors who write with so much insight into how people really relate to each other.

[Babs · Rating 5 out of 5]

A favorite.

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've never read any D.H Lawrence before, and I was not impressed. I only read the short stories (no chance of my delving into the travel writing and poetry, and the novels were abridged, and I still haven't recovered from the time I accidentally read the abridged Little Women, a version in which Meg doesn't die. I swear.) I found them to be, without exception, occasionally interesting but generally meandering, and wholly lacking in any kind of tension. If D.H. isn't already on the outs, I will formally predict that he will be completely passe and forgotten by the mid 21st century, mentioned about as frequently as John Dos Passos. (If you don't know who that is, my point is made.)

Plus, none of them were even remotely dirty.

[Death Jon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe this wasn't a good place to start but with other Viking Portables I've had good luck so I bought this for $3 from Pilot Books(RIP). I found the writing sloppy at times and the pacing uneven. I read 2 1/2 short stories and a couple poems. I may pick up a proper novel down the road but if this is how his other books are they too will end up as table levellers.

[Daniel Bruzzone · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was edited well to show a cross-section of D.H. Lawrence's writing, which I was totally unfamiliar with when I started. There were sections (the poetry section in particular) that I wish had been much, much longer. I also want to read The Rainbow, and The Fox was fantastic, but I'm not sure if that's because I had recently finished reading Helen Oyeyemi's "Mr. Fox" which clearly riffed off of it. The imagery in many of these stories was fantastic. But, just as there were shining examples of great writing, there were also portions of this book that were quite a slog. Overall, the 5-star parts and the 1-star parts averaged to 3, although I'm not sure any portion in isolation would have been.