On this day in 1885 D. H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood, outside Nottingham, the fourth of five children. Lawrence's autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers (1913) made famous the tortured conditions of his upbringing: his uneducated father's pit-and-pub life, his mother's contempt for this and her self-sacrifice in order that her children might avoid it, Lawrence's own conflicted feelings of being absolutely devoted to and yet smothered by his mother. The novel and all of the biographical documents covering the author's early life overwhelmingly support the idea that Lawrence shared young Paul Morel's nightly prayer that his father would either stop drinking or die in a mine accident ... FULL STORY »
