David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930) led a restless, colorful, controversial life. Born in Nottinghamshire, he was the son of a rough coal miner and a genteel mother. Lawrence's mother longed to have her children rise above their working-class origins, and the young boy identified strongly with his mother. However, as an adult, Lawrence came to appreciate the primitive natural integrity of his father and others of his class as opposed to the smothering conventional aspirations of his mother and other members of the higher social classes. In 1909, Lawrence published his first poems and in the following year a novel. He taught school for a while but gave this up after meeting Frieda von Richthofen, a German woman whom he married. Lawrence's first major novel, the autobiographical Sons and Lovers, was finished shortly thereafter. The novel deals with a boy's attempt to break away from a domineering mother and to establish his own identity.

Lawrence contracted tuberculosis, always fatal in those days, shortly after his mother's death from cancer and was acutely aware that his life would be short. He seems to have spent his brief life resisting the bounds of conventional society's expectations in order to live fully, and his fiction often explores the struggle of a character to escape the spiritual death of the modern world and live a full, exuberant life. Lawrence died at the age of 44 from tuberculosis.