Conversations from the Cullman Center, LIVE from NYPL: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence: Frances Wilson with Andrew Motion

Award-winning biographer Frances Wilson focuses on three distinct experiences in the life of D.H. Lawrence during his most productive decade.

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In her new book, Frances Wilson offers a less familiar version of Lawrence, both as a man and as a writer. Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence begins with the 1915 obscenity prosecution for Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow. Wilson pursues him over the following decade as he travels around the globe in a Dante-inspired triptych of lesser-known but critical  turning points: first in Cornwall, then in Italy, finally in New Mexico. And it explores the influence of his three central adversaries: his wife Frieda; the writer Maurice Magnus; and his benefactress, Mabel Dodge Luhan.

Frances Wilson researched and wrote Burning Man during her 2018–2019 Fellowship at the Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She discusses her book with former UK poet laureate Andrew Motion.

Produced in partnership with The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

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Frances Wilson suggests these titles for further reading:

• Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence — NYPL Catalog ; NYPL Talking Books ; Bookshare
• Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence — NYPL Catalog ; Bookshare
• Mornings in Mexico by D. H. Lawrence — NYPL Research & Reference ; Bookshare
• The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays by D. H. Lawrence, ed. Geoff Dyer — NYPL Catalog ; Bookshare
• Lorenzo in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan — NYPL Research & Reference

 

Frances Wilson is a critic, a journalist, and the author of several works of nonfiction, including Literary Seductions; The Courtesan’s Revenge; The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, which won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; How to Survive the Titanic, winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography; and Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London with her daughter.

Andrew Motion was the UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009 and is now Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University. He is the co-founder of the Poetry Archive (poetryarchive.co.uk) and was knighted for his services to poetry in 2010. His most recent collection of poems is Randomly Moving Particles (2020). He lives in Baltimore.

 

 

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The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, The von der Heyden Family Foundation, John and Constance Birkelund, and The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and with additional gifts from Helen and Roger Alcaly, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Arts and Letters Foundation Inc., William W. Karatz, Merilee and Roy Bostock, and Cullman Center Fellows.

LIVE from NYPL is made possible by the support of Library patrons and friends, as well as by the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos, and the Margaret and Herman Sokol Public Education Endowment Fund.