Letters to Thomas & Adele Seltzer

by D.H. Lawrence

For seven years (1919-1926), Thomas Seltzer was one of New York City's most influential small publishers, a compact engine of the coming modern movement. Born in Russia in 1875, he was a proponent of progressive politics and experimental writing, a founding editor of The Masses, and the first editor in chief of the Modern Library. At Thomas Seltzer Inc. he translated Tolstoy and Gorky, edited Chekhov and Turgenev, and published Henry James and Stefan Zweig. Most important, he championed D. H. Lawrence at a crucial period in his literary development, publishing the first U.S. editions of The Rainbow, Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, Aaron's Rod - twenty titles in all. Lawrence trusted him, enjoyed his intelligence and can-do spirit, and became warm friends to both him and his wife, Adele, who was very much a partner in Seltzer's business.

284 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1976

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.
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