"THE GREATEST IMAGINATIVE NOVELIST OF OUR GENERATION" (E.M. FORSTER)

LAWRENCE, D.H. Love Among the Haystacks and Other Pieces. London: Nonesuch Press, 1930. Octavo, original half tan buckram with yellow cloth boards, uncut, original dust jacket. $450.

Limited first edition, issued posthumously, of four previously unpublished prose works by Lawrence, number 1051 of 1600 copies issued by the prestigious Nonesuch Press, in original dust jacket.

Lawrence remains one of the 20th century's most controversial writers. While he was scorned by T.S. Eliot, Lawrence was, to E.M. Forster, "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation" (Meyers, D.H. Lawrence, 382). He had a powerful influence on writers from Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender and Tennessee Williams, to George Orwell, who wrote: "The ultimate subject-matter of nearly all Lawrence's books is the failure of contemporary men… to live their lives intensely enough" (Meyers, Legacy, 5). Love among the Haystacks contains the title work and three more prose works, each in print for the first time: Chapel among the Mountains, Hay Hut among the Mountains, and Once. They were written shortly after he finished Sons and Lovers (1913) and near the same time he eloped with Frieda, whose presence inhabits these tales, particularly in the image of a woman in the title story who is described as "strange, foreign, different from the ordinary girls… brighter, more fascinating than in anyone he had known." The four works had been sent to Edward Garnett in the hopes he could find a magazine to publish them, but they were not in fact printed until this posthumous collection, issued the same year as Lawrence's death. Also containing a "Reminiscence" by David Garnett. "Despite the statement on p. [97], no copies have been identified with a Random House imprint" (Roberts A56).

Book with inner paper hinges starting but strong. Dust jacket with shallow chipping and minor toning to extremities. A near-fine copy.