Authors

DH Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence was born David Herbert Lawrence on September 11, 1885 in a small mining town of Eastwood Nottinghamshire, England.
His father was a coal miner and his mother worked in a lace-making industry
Lawrence’s mother was from a middle class family that had fallen into financial ruin, but not before she became well educated and a lover of literature.
She instilled in D.H. a love of books and a desire to rise above his blue-collar beginnings.
D.H. struggled to fit in with other boys as he was physically frail and susceptible to illness. In addition, he was poor at sports and unlike every other boy in town had no desire to follow in his father’s footsteps to become a miner.
After his brother fell ill and died, D.H. came down with pneumonia. He eventually recovered and started working as a student teacher where he met a young woman named Jessie Chambers.
He started to write poetry and began his first novel, The White Peacock
He went on to write many more works of literature until he fell ill with tuberculosis and returned to Italy in 1927.
It was during this time he wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his best known and infamous novel, which was published in 1928.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover explores in graphic detail the sexual relationship between an aristocratic lady and a working class man.
Due to the graphic content, the book was banned in the United States until 1959 and in England until 1960.
In 1960, a jury found Penguin Books not guilty of violating Britain’s Obscene Publications Act and allowed the company to publish the book.
The jury’s decision to allow the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover Is considered a turning point in the history of expression and the open discussion of sex in popular culture.
Lawrence died in Vence, France on March 2, 1930, at the age of 44
For much of the latter part of his life, he was accused of being a crude and pornographic writer.
He is now widely considered - alongside James Joyce and Virginia Woolf - as one of the great modernist English-language writers that explored subject matters of psychological complexity and female sexuality.
Lawrence himself considered his writings an attempt to challenge and expose what he saw as constrictive and oppressive having stated, “If there weren’t so many lies i the world … I wouldn’t write at all.”

Alice Munroe

Alice Munro, original name, Alice Ann Laidlaw, was born on July 10, 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, Canada.
She is a Canadian short-story writer. The Swedish Academy dubbed her a “master of the contemporary short story” when it awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.
Munro’s work is noted for “its precise imagery and narrative style … revealing the depth and complexities in the emotional lives of everyday people.”
Munro was born on a fox and mink farm.
Her mother was a teacher, and played a significant role in her life, as did her great aunt and her grandmother.
Munro attended the University of Western Ontario but left after two years of studying English and journalism.
At the age of 20 she married her first husband and moved to Victoria, Vancouver where she and her husband opened a bookstore and raised three daughters.
After her first marriage ended, in 1972, she returned to Ontario.
Munro began writing stories as a teenager, and persevered in her “attempt to establish herself as a writer, despite rejection from publishers and limitations imposed on her careers by the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood.”

Thomas King

Thomas King, aka Hartley GoodWeather
Born April 24, 1943 in California
Novelist, short-story writer, essayist, screenwriter, and photographer
A Member of the Order of Canada and nominated for the Governor General’s Awards.
Often described as one of the finest contemporary Indigenous writers in North America
His mother is Greek and his father is Cherokee
King failed his first year of university, took many jobs including bank teller and craps dealer
In 1964 he worked in New Zealand and Australia as a photographer and photojournalist.
He moved back to the United States in 1967, attended Chico State University and worked as a teacher at Humboldt State University
He earned his PhD in 1986.
His PhD dissertation was on Native American studies, and was one of the earliest works to explore the oral storytelling tradition as literature.
King moved to Canada and taught Native studies at the University of Lethbridge.
He is currently an English professor at the University of Guelph and lives in Guelph.
His first novel, Medicine River (1990) received considerable critical praise and was made into a CBC film.