Status
Available
Publication
New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 1989.
Description
T. E. Lawrence remains one of the most fascinating and enigmatic figures of the 20th century. This account, composed of his remarkable epistles to contemporaries such as Lady Astor, Noel Coward, Robert Graves, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, and Mrs. George Bernard Shaw, discloses both the inner man and the political and military visionary often obscured behind the mystery and myth of "Lawrence of Arabia." Among the letters is a wealth of intriguing correspondence that divulges the true nature of Lawrence's role in the Arab Revolt, his anxieties about his illegitimacy, and his secret feelings on women and sexuality. In their entirety, these letters describe a remarkable but tragic life and provide ample proof of a gifted literary mind.
Media reviews
Correspondence of the legendary warrior/scholar, much of it published for the first time (being newly in the public domain after 50 years of top-secret classification). Editor Brown has chosen with an eye towards illuminating the conundrums that obscure our understanding of Lawrence. And so these
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letters do shed some — if still not enough — light on their author's complex nature. Show Less
Lawrence was a better-than-good letter writer and this collection provides as much of a truthful, accurate autobiography as anyone has a right to hope for. It shows us Lawrence in all his indefinable humanity, as traveller, scholar, soldier, writer, critic, politician and, supremely, friend. By its
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careful editing, it portrays a man of such complexity that his often-disbelieved cry for simplicity is seen, at the last, as both necessary and inevitable. Show Less