D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence grew up the son of a Nottinghamshire coal miner and a mother determined he escape the pits, training as a teacher before his writing life began. In 1912 he eloped with Frieda Weekley, the German-born wife of his former modern-languages professor; they married two years later, but Frieda's nationality and his own pacifism made them suspects during the First World War, and The Rainbow was seized and prosecuted for obscenity in 1915.

He and Frieda then lived a restless 'savage pilgrimage' across Italy, Ceylon, Australia, and New Mexico, always short of money, always writing. Lady Chatterley's Lover, privately printed in Italy in 1928, could not be published unexpurgated in Britain until 1960, after a landmark obscenity trial three decades after his death. Lawrence died of tuberculosis in Vence, in the south of France, in 1930, at forty-four.