Burning Man

“Never trust the teller,” wrote D. H. Lawrence, “trust the tale.” Everyone who knew him told stories about Lawrence, and Lawrence told stories about everyone he knew. He also, again and again, told stories about himself: the pioneer of autofiction. No writer before Lawrence had made so permeable the border between life and literature. In Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence, the acclaimed biographer Frances Wilson tells a new story about Lawrence, focusing on his decade of superhuman writing and travel between 1915, when The Rainbow was prosecuted, and 1925, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Taking after Lawrence’s own model, Dante, and adopting the structure of his Divine Comedy, Burning Man is a distinctly Lawrentian biography, one that pursues Lawrence around the globe and reflects his life of wild allegory.

Eschewing the confines of a full-length biography, Burning Man is a triptych of lesser-known episodes drawn from lesser-known sources, and from the tales of Lawrence told by his friends in letters, memoirs, and diaries. Focusing on three critical turning points in Lawrence’s pilgrimage (his crises in Cornwall, Italy, and New Mexico) and three central adversaries―his wife, Frieda; the writer Maurice Magnus; and his benefactress, Mabel Dodge Luhan―Wilson uncovers a lesser-known Lawrence, both as a writer and as a man.

Dizzyingly original, exhaustively researched, and always revelatory, Burning Man is a marvel of biography. With flair and focus, Wilson, Lawrence’s first female biographer, unleashes a distinct perspective on one of history’s most beloved and infamous writers.