Studies in Classic American Literature

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist, storywriter, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. Among his works, Sons and Lovers appeared in 1913, The Rainbow in 1915, Women In Love in 1920, and many others.

“Nobody ever read [the great old books] like Lawrence did—as madly, as wildly or as insightfully. . . . With its one-sentence paragraphs (“Flop goes spiritual love.”), jabbing exclamations (“Freedom!”), semi-rhetorical questions (“But what of Walt Whitman?”) and heavy use of italics and all-caps, the book can read like a scroll of social-media rants. Its manner is neither respectable nor respectful. . . . Lawrence’s bristling, inflamed, impertinent language provides a reminder that criticism is not just the work of the brain, but of the gut and the spleen as well. The intellectual refinement of his argument—fine-grained evaluations of style and form that still startle with their incisiveness; breathtaking conceptual leaps from history to myth and back again—is unthinkable without the churn of instinct and feeling beneath it. . . . You will be jolted awake.” —A. O. Scott, The New York Times

• 1. The Spirit of Place2. Benjamin Franklin3. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur4. Fenimore Cooper's White Novels5. Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels6. Edgar Allan Poe7. Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter8. Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance9. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast10. Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo11. Herman Melville's Moby Dick12. Whitman